- Joined
- Oct 4, 2021
- Messages
- 2,540
I've had my Tormek T-8 for about a week now and I'm starting to wrap my head around it. I ended up getting it with the SG-250 wheel, which is their standard kit. I was thinking about going straight to CBN wheels, but I'm glad I didn't. The SG wheel is more forgiving, and I've needed some forgiving in my early days. 
The main thing I had to learn was to keep the blade flat on the stone, which is easy with relatively short knives, but it takes some technique with long ones. If you roll the blade, the corner of the stone hits the bevel and it leaves a mark. Not super difficult, but it takes some repetition to get it down.
There is a "stone grader" which you use to alter the grit of the wheel from around 200 up to 1000, depending on which side of the grader you use (it's essentially a two-sided stone with coarse and fine sides). You can raise a burr in under a minute to two minutes with the coarse-graded stone. After that it's just 2-3 passes per side on the fine-graded stone and you're ready for the deburring phase.
There's a smaller, leather honing wheel on the opposite side of the machine, which you can use plain or with compound. I'm using the compound that shipped with the machine for now. By default, you pretty much have to hone freehand, because the handle of any knife longer than around 3.5" is going to hit the grind wheel if you use the tool support. Freehanding on an 8" wheel isn't the easiest thing to master, but it's okay for knocking off the burr. Of course you could remove the grind wheel at this stage, which isn't difficult, but I'm going for speed with this machine, so I don't want to do that.
What I'm doing now is skipping the honing wheel altogether and going from the grinding wheel to the Ken Onion Belt Grinder with leather belts for stropping. I'm using a three-strop process with green compound, 1 micron diamond spray, and plain leather, but I'm still experimenting with that progression. Here's the result on my AD20.5 in D2:
btw, that's my disassembled Bugout in the background. Waiting on delivery of a replacement omega spring. Yep, busted springs are real!
The main thing I had to learn was to keep the blade flat on the stone, which is easy with relatively short knives, but it takes some technique with long ones. If you roll the blade, the corner of the stone hits the bevel and it leaves a mark. Not super difficult, but it takes some repetition to get it down.
There is a "stone grader" which you use to alter the grit of the wheel from around 200 up to 1000, depending on which side of the grader you use (it's essentially a two-sided stone with coarse and fine sides). You can raise a burr in under a minute to two minutes with the coarse-graded stone. After that it's just 2-3 passes per side on the fine-graded stone and you're ready for the deburring phase.
There's a smaller, leather honing wheel on the opposite side of the machine, which you can use plain or with compound. I'm using the compound that shipped with the machine for now. By default, you pretty much have to hone freehand, because the handle of any knife longer than around 3.5" is going to hit the grind wheel if you use the tool support. Freehanding on an 8" wheel isn't the easiest thing to master, but it's okay for knocking off the burr. Of course you could remove the grind wheel at this stage, which isn't difficult, but I'm going for speed with this machine, so I don't want to do that.
What I'm doing now is skipping the honing wheel altogether and going from the grinding wheel to the Ken Onion Belt Grinder with leather belts for stropping. I'm using a three-strop process with green compound, 1 micron diamond spray, and plain leather, but I'm still experimenting with that progression. Here's the result on my AD20.5 in D2:
btw, that's my disassembled Bugout in the background. Waiting on delivery of a replacement omega spring. Yep, busted springs are real!
