Tips for Convexing a Long One?

S

sketchbag

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I'm half a day away from my first sip of koolaid, which means I'm at best a few days away from screwing up some infi. I know I wont be able to help myself from tinkering, so I wanna take in some tips and practice them on my RAT-7 d2 first.

I can sharpen with a mousepad/sandpaper well enough, but I've never done any drastic reprofiling with the setup.

I could especially use some advice on keeping as much of the coating in tact as possible.

I know this might be a maintenance type thread, but want to hear specifically of the techniques people are confident in using on their prized busses.
 
Keeping the coating intact is just a matter of controlling your angles--the top of the edge bevel shoulder (however high it ends up) is where I'd set the knife to start with, then tip up a few degrees and go. Unfortunately it's one of those muscle-memory things that really only comes from doing it a little bit.

As to major reprofiling, I wouldn't employ the mousepad at all. You need to bear down on a solid surface--cut flat bevels on flat surfaces for serious material removal and then round off the corners as a finishing step with the mousepad. It's much faster to do reprofiling on a belt sander, of course, although mistakes happen more quickly aswell. Just takes practice--I learned to control my angles on about a dozen $5 machetes that I picked up at a hardware store years ago. By the fifth or sixth I was actually doing a reasonably consistent job of controlling my hands, and then went back and fixed the first ones.

Go slow, be deliberate about focusing on what you're doing and not watching TV or anything like. If you're going to do it by hand, then don't force yourself to get it all done in one sitting--when you get bored/tired of it your standards will go down, and slip-ups start happening.

Oh, and one quick trick for figuring your angle of stropping when you are getting the edge back to convex---put a line of masking tape about 1/16" to 1/8" above the edge shoulder, so you'll have just a little pinstripe of coating you can see between them. If your angle is correct, the sandpaper should not get hung up in the tape, if you're going too shallow then the paper will bite easily into the tape and resist your pull. Don't put the tape exactly even with the top of the edge shoulder because you'll then hit it every time as the mousepad collapses beneath the pressure.

Best of luck,
Warren
 
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