Using Diamond Hones ??

Nosmo

Nosmo

Joined
Jul 12, 2003
Messages
346
I do 90% of my sharpening with an EdgePro and lately I have been just using a medium Eze Lap diamond hone. Being lazy and no mess was the original motivation to try this combination.

Now Ben, the owner of EdgePro, does NOT recommend diamond as an abrasive with his sharpener except when the blade is ceramic or a very hard steel.
He states that the diamonds will be stripped off the hone in no time flat and can embed in the blade.etc,etc.

To date I have found that this is just not the case and even soft German kitchen knives respond well to the diamond. As long as very little pressure is used, and one lets the diamond do the work, all seems well.

I would be interested in any comments.
 
Nosmo said:
To date I have found that this is just not the case and even soft German kitchen knives respond well to the diamond.
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Diamond like Titanium is a coating that helps to control the heat. So your tools are not suppose to burn up as fast. I have been using various diamond coated tools, like sand paper and grinders for the dremel and drill bits. In some cases I have gotten acceptable results, but I think they need to work on the technology a bit more. I would not want to invest in the much more expansive full sized tools like the grinding discs and things like that.
 
Nosmo-

Good to hear from you. Get any new cutters lately? I sprung for a Spyderco ZDP129 Calypso Jr just to see what Rc 62+ steel felt like on the sharpener. Didn't notice much difference from the others like VG-10 Spyderco Steel. It does give a nice edge.

I don't use a diamond strop/hone but have heard of some who use it with great success. Apparantly the diamond dust comes in a spray bottle of some sort, very very fine. The user sprays it on the leather and strops away.

It is used extensively in the jewelry business for polishing gold, platinum, gemstones, etc.

I use an x-course DMT whetstone 2"x 6" for reprofiling. I don't think any diamond specs have ever flaked off and embedded into the steel (or if they did they were so small I couldn't tell it).

DMT say's their diamonds have the better crystallin structure and don't flake. I don't know if this is true or hype. Sounds good and they do get more for their stuff than some other sellers of diamond whetstones charge.

http://www.dmtsharp.com/general/basicsharp.htm
 
JohnR7 said:
Diamond like Titanium is a coating that helps to control the heat. So your tools are not suppose to burn up as fast. I have been using various diamond coated tools, like sand paper and grinders for the dremel and drill bits. In some cases I have gotten acceptable results, but I think they need to work on the technology a bit more. I would not want to invest in the much more expansive full sized tools like the grinding discs and things like that.
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Not trying to be a smarta$$ but this is not correct. Titanium itself is a pretty soft metal and not used as a coating. Numerous non-metalic Titanium compounds such as TiN, TiO2, TiNC, and TiCN can be used as coating by applying usually in the vapor phase a thin film on top of a base layer. The reason is not to control heat but in most cases to increase hardness, as the compounds are many times as hard as steel. They are all in the range of corundum (ruby). In other cases they are applied as corrosion protection or to decrease friction. The same is true for CBN which is the second hardest material currently available, about twice as hard as Ruby and half as hard as Diamond. Diamond, however, can NOT be used as coating.....yet. There have been successful attempts in research labs to do so, but all of that still belongs in the realm of soon to be realized science fiction. For cutting tools, industrial grade (or synthetic) diamonds are embedded in a softer material, commonly Nickel. The diamonds stick out of the Nickel and do the cutting. The reason for this is again the hardness of the diamond. If the diamonds are multi crystaline, they fracture relatively easy and wiggle themselves out of the supporting Ni. Even if they are single crystaline diamonds, eventually they will break off or fall out of the Ni support. The gentler you are with them, the longer they will last, since they don't really abrade due to their hardness. There are well supported reports that at high speed and elevated temperatures (e.g. powertools with diamond cutoff blades), the carbon of the diamond will dissolve in steel, and change the properties of the steel. I very much doubt that this is an issue on a "hand powered" diamond grinding plate.

The technology is pretty well established. Diamond cutoff wheels are pretty much the standard for many applications. It sees extensive use in cutting asphalt for example. Like any abrasive wheel, it needs eventually replacing, face it, de Beer lies: not even a diamond is forever.

I have had good experiences with diamond benchstones they cut fast and are pretty care free, the only trouble with them is, that even the finest available grits are pretty coarse. Well, that is not quite true, but if you want a diamond benchstone that reaches the grits of waterstones you are looking at $600 per bench stone. Alternatively, you can use diamond powder on a soft backing, which many people here have used with good success.
 
I've used a 150x EZE-Lap to grind in a profile and used a Dremel felt wheel with 0.5 micron buffing compound to remove the burr. Felt a lot like a factory sharpening job and looked like one, too, only it hurt more. :rolleyes:
 
Ben told me something similar on the phone when I ordered my edge pro. I didn't buy it then and still don't. I have had better luck using diamond sharpeners than anything else in the past. If anything they cut fast and accurately. As for the dimonds embedding in the steel. I don't recall him saying that to me. He did say they would gouge into the steel deeper than necessary though and the scarring from the much harder diamonds may in fact hold water but if the end result is a blade that cuts so what?

I have noticed no ill side effects sharpening with my EZELap diamond sharpeners and I've used them for years. I usually buy a med and fine and in time they wear down to be super fine and ultra fine. I have some at that point of wear now and these do not cut into the blades all that bad. They just simply set the edge up and make it cut again like it did when first reprofiled.

STR
 
Yeah. My extra coarse EZE-Lap's diamonds smoothed out so now their 150x feels more like 180-220, but they've stayed that way for a long time. Same with the diamonds for Sharpmaker.

Weird.
 
thombrogan said:
I've used a 150x EZE-Lap to grind in a profile and used a Dremel felt wheel with 0.5 micron buffing compound to remove the burr. Felt a lot like a factory sharpening job and looked like one, too, only it hurt more. :rolleyes:
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I didn't use a Dremel to polish like you did, but I also found that using a coarser diamond hone produces an edge that more closely matches factory. I should try that Dremel method too.
Everytime I get a new knife I check the edge out under magnification, and sure enough most factory Spydercos and Benchmades have coarser looking edges with polish. I looks like a toothy edge where the "teeth" are polished smooth. My blades that have been sharpened on ceramic just look like polished straight edges.
 
Ben tends to prefer higher polishes and he can achieve very high slicing aggression with them, so it isn't surprising that he prefers his stones which are much finer than the available diamonds. Plus with the way the edge pro is set up, you can easily apply a lot of pressure, much more that the weight of the knife that most people use on diamond benchstones, so you can also damage the stones readily. That being said I have a bunch of DMT stones which get frequent use and they are still working well. I just use them for finish work though, no heavy metal removal.

-Cliff
 
You can't use too much pressure with the Apex version of the EdgePro or you'll bow its plastic legs.

I know that when an edge is almost thin, it will slice aggressively even with a high-polish, but how would it slash with a coarse polish? Take a Phil Wilson style edge (on a Phil Wilson style steel) and it will slice very well with a highly-polished edge, but won't it slice better with a coarse finish (like the one he recommends on his website)? Just as a polished edge resists damage better and cuts better for pushcuts, would a coarse edge do both tasks the same for pullcuts?
 
Recently I took a South Fork from Wilson in S30V and sharpened it finishing on a 1200 dmt stone, it glided through 3/8" hemp with 21.5/9.5 lbs on a push/draw respectively. I started working with it on chromium oxide loaded leather and reduced it down to 12.5/6.5 respectively after 20 passes per side. There was a huge loss of slicing aggression now, but the almost 2:1 increase in push cutting ability more than compensated.

However the edge retention on a slice has been sacrificed, I may do some rope cutting to quantify this later. So the question becomes what is more important, how it cuts now, or how it cuts after 200 slices have been made. In the latter, the really coarse edges tend to stand out. However I don't think leather loaded strops are the best sharpening medium because you lose far too much aggression I think because of rounding due to the give of the leather, or maybe it is just the buffing medium being too soft for the steel.

For reference the above knife was 90/135 on thread and cotton at the end, this is *well* beyond shaving and the ability to push cut newsprint. However Ben Dale's entry in the sharpening contest was 71/57. Thus he achieved about a 30% increase in push cutting sharpness and almost 3:1 on *aggression* at the same time. His combination of push / slicing sharpness is really amazing. It is the hard backed tapes, the nature of the abrasive, or just his skill?

It doesn't surprise me that he doesn't have a lot of need for really coarse edges, especially when sharpening is so trivial for him that the extra edge retention of the really coarse ones isn't going to be of benefit, and as Jeff Clark has noted, these edge do lead to a greater reduction in blade lifetime as the rate of metal loss is greater, even though the edge lifetime is higher.

So a lot depends on the person doing the cutting, you take someone like Mike Swaim who worked in a plant cutting fish and really coarse edges will stand out because they work better under heavy force and they will cut for longer and you really don't care about wearing out your knife faster.

In regards to the force applied, when setting the aggression you have to match the strength of the user, really aggressive wood saws for example require the strength to drive the saw into the wood and pull/push it along the wood. Without this the saw won't cut as well as a saw with less aggression. It is the same thing with knives, so it isn't just what you are cutting and how, but the specific amount of force you can apply.

-Cliff
 
Cliff Stamp said:
However I don't think leather loaded strops are the best sharpening medium because you lose far too much aggression I think because of rounding due to the give of the leather, or maybe it is just the buffing medium being too soft for the steel.
-Cliff
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I have come to think the same, which is in part the reason, why I try do get good enough on the waterstones, that I can forgo the stropping on leather. I noticed that using Murray Carters three finger test, stropped edges feel a lot less sharp, then when they come directly of the waterstone, even though they shave as well or may be even better. However, when I did thread cutting tests, the non-leather stropped edges where at least as good if not better than the stropped ones, but unlike you, I have never really bothered to quantify this. Murray Carter states something similar on his DVD and says this is due to a rounding over of the edge. Interesting is though, that my coworker seems to like the stropped microtome blades for ice shaving better than the non-leather stropped. She says, they are a little smoother.
 
My waterstones are fairly coarse, 4000 grit and a natural one which measures similar, but you can get a lot finer, I would find it hard to argue for the chromium oxide buffing compound if the stone's abrasive was similar in size. Some of them like the high end shaptons are really fine, and you can now get really fine micron class sandpaper. I will be resharpening the South Fork on the sandpaper on hardwood shortly to see if it gets better and will compare it to newsprint with the buffing compound on hardwood, and some diamond lapping compound if I can find it.

-Cliff
 
It is the hard backed tapes, the nature of the abrasive, or just his skill?
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I think I can safely say that it is his skill in using the specific abrasive on hard-backed tapes - meaning all of the above synergistically speaking.
 
I haven't had the apex edge pro for long compared to some of you guys but if I had to buy it again I'd opt to get two of the course stones, and two of the 220 grit ones and the 1200 grit ceramic and stop at that. I have a feeling the course will wear out pretty quick; as I've already had to reflatten mine at less than a month old. Since it gets used a lot I figure two would be necessary. The 220 obviously won't wear quite as fast but it is starting to show a little dip too now.


For most utility cutting those two stones put a great slicing edge on any blade. The 220 and a couple of swipes on the ceramic are where I stop with all my kitchen knives using it and I've been quite happy with their performance. I don't find that the supre fine matrix strips do any better for me than the strop on my wood carving knives. Those and my whittling knives are really the only ones I put a fine push cutting edge on. The rest get a general utility slicing edge that is a bit toothy by comparison.

Where the diamonds come into play for me is after using the knives I've sharpened a bit. The ceramic doesn't seem to work as well after about the third time around but if you lightly swipe a few times on the fine or super fine diamond suddenly the edge is right back to biting sharp all over again.

STR
 
Cliff,

Thanks for the explanation. I'm still re-evaluating my parrotting of the Juranitch/Lee philosophy (thin is in/finer is finer) and your comments have added much grist for that mill.

STR,

While it slowed down reprofiling a little, I switched from the 120x SiC stone to a 150x EZE-Lap stone. If you double-sided tape one to a stone blank (as opposed to the tape blank), it should match fairly close to the rest of your stones. Otherwise, your 120x and 220x will be at different angles while the angle guide is at the same setting. Fulloflead does more EdgePro reprofiling than me and brought that problem to my attention.

Nosmo's the first one to run with the ball and do a whole set of coarse, medium, and fine EZE-Lap stones affixed to stone blanks. Actually, you might want to try an EZE-Lap coarse stone. It's 250x and may be all you need for pre-strop shenanigans.
 
Thanks Thom. I have not noticed the edge profile difference in the angles from the 120 to the 220 stones that came with my set up. Looking at the stones I have they appear to be the same thickness. How is that possible?

I'll will look into the EZELap idea. I like their stones and already have several.

Thanks again.

STR
 
Diamond dust in a spray bottle for the leather strap??!! Please tell me the brand and where you got it? This sounds totally awsome..it would save me a step maybe...If you could it would be GREATLY Appreciated!...As soon as I read this I called some friends but they didnt know and were very interested also.
 
Ben Dale is absolutely amazing when it comes to sharpening. Hey Thom, I've got a bottle of green compound from Hand American. Going to be picking up a dremel felt wheel this weekend. Thanks for the tip.

Lots of great stuff in this thread. While we may not ever achieve the *ultimate* edge, it's fun to chase it!
 
STR said:
...get two of the course stones
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Unless it is a cosmetic issue, just buy a large x-coarse japanese waterstone, I use 200, but there are better ones, and use this to set the primary edge. Much faster than the edge pro and much cheaper. Use the edge pro to then even out the bevel saving wear on it significantly.

-Cliff
 
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