Course Grinding with Waterstones?

[tnimble]

tnimble: I have had a good goole around and can't find either of your suggested products. Where do you buy from?

From a online company in the Netherlands who only sell to dutch companies unfortionally. They also don't list all types. Ask for it and find out they either alread stock it but haven;t gone trough the trouble listing it online or they'll order it for you.

...
If you are using muscle power then abrading over a larger area speeds things up. If you have a large flat surface to stick abrasive paper or emery cloth to, this will win over the limited surface area of a diamond stone. (Try eBay for materials).
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Mind that cloth backed emery is one of the softest abrasives meant for polishing metals. Aluminium oxide (AlO) is a bit harder followed by silicon carbide (SiC) which is meant for light meal grinding work.

The abrasive material is not what defines it's W&D, tt's the bonding material that determines. But most W&D is either AlO or SiC thats why SiC is often referred to as W&D. But when getting W&D you could as easily get stuck with Em or AlO which will breakdown in only a few or a couple of tens strokes.

Also the grit size is important. When trying to get a ding out of 0.2 mm with 180 grit you're in for a long task. ISO P180 is about 80 um. Ideally when the abrasive particles would not breakup and the efficiency was 100% you would require about 250 strokes. But in reality you could count of switching abrasives a couple of they and doing about 1,000 strokes or so I guess.

 

[paulm]

Wizer,

Try here

link

can buy a "bulk pack" or single sheets, haven't tried myself but Matthew stocks some good stuff and avoids anything rubbish so think it should do you nicely !

Also this stuff

link

Cheers, Paul.

 

[jonbikebod]

Tnimble,
I agree the binding material is perhaps the most important. I used the most used term of ‘emery cloth’ but most cloth backed abrasive I have found use aluminium oxide as the abrasive medium and therefore quite hard enough to work Rockwell 62 tool steel.
I have used Hermes 100g silicon carbide (Axminster) and found it looses its ‘cut’ in just a few strokes, mounted on granite. Some high quality aluminium oxide, cloth backed from abrasive Tilgear (Italian made, can’t remember the name) stays sharp many, many times longer.
Clearly you have researched this more than I have but it my experience cloth substrate with the appropriate binder for the abrasive particles works better than silicone carbide although the abrasive particles are harder. I have not bothered to work out if the larger silicon carbide crystals fracture or get pulled out of their binding medium but when used with a small contact area/high pressure like bevel forming.
This does of course confirm your finding that there are different grades of ‘wet & dry’ intended for different purposes.
Jon.

 

[58954]

WIZeR,
Coarse grinding can also be done with diamond paste. I find it faster than with diamond stones, even faster than with the extra extra coarse DMT stone.

It started like that on the coarse (blue) dmt stone.
So I loaded a metal plate with 45 micron norton diamond paste

and start grinding using a jig.
A few stokes later:

To cut fast I like to reload the plate frequently with diamond paste.

a few more strokes and :

here we are...
The finished blade :

Tooks more time to take the pics than to reestablish the bevel
Cheers,
Simon

 

[tnimble]

...
I have used Hermes 100g silicon carbide (Axminster) and found it looses its ‘cut’ in just a few strokes, mounted on granite. Some high quality aluminium oxide, cloth backed from abrasive Tilgear (Italian made, can’t remember the name) stays sharp many, many times longer.
Clearly you have researched this more than I have but it my experience cloth substrate with the appropriate binder for the abrasive particles works better than silicone carbide although the abrasive particles are harder. I have not bothered to work out if the larger silicon carbide crystals fracture or get pulled out of their binding medium but when used with a small contact area/high pressure like bevel forming.
...

A few observations:
- The SiC particles are harder, the bonding to the backer must be of better quality as the particles are more prune to be pulled out instead of breaking up.
- The pressure used is to high, with harder particles they are more likly to chatter instead of breakdown. There are syntactic ceramic particles for high pressure applications. See the #M site.
- When grinding the edged tool only pull strokes should be used. When making push strokes the pointy tip dips forward and starts scooping. With a softer abrasive you behead the particles making them less stickout and increase theri baring surface and thus reduce the scooping effect making the paper last longer but at the cost of grading the abrasive to a smoother/finer girt.

 

[jonbikebod]

Tnimble,
There are many 3M products available in the States that are not available to us in the UK.
When I visited the Lie-Nielsen factory, they were using a 3M ‘golden’ silicon carbide adhesive backed paper on surface tables for final flattening. I was able to buy some from an outlet of a large automotive supply chain and brought it back as hand luggage. It isn’t available here because European automotive abrasive products use Velcro for attachment to pads and power tools.
There are many other 3M products they simply don’t ship to the UK – if they don’t sell it there won’t be a demand for it…
Jon.

 

[Chris Knight]

When you can buy a grinderfrom Machine mart for £18, it does seem masochistic to use paper or waterstones.

 

[tnimble]

Tnimble,
There are many 3M products available in the States that are not available to us in the UK.
When I visited the Lie-Nielsen factory, they were using a 3M ‘golden’ silicon carbide adhesive backed paper on surface tables for final flattening. I was able to buy some from an outlet of a large automotive supply chain and brought it back as hand luggage. It isn’t available here because European automotive abrasive products use Velcro for attachment to pads and power tools.
There are many other 3M products they simply don’t ship to the UK – if they don’t sell it there won’t be a demand for it…
Jon.

Indeed. That 'golden' abrasive, how did you find it to work and have you got any article code / product number for it?

 

[George_N]

When you can buy a grinderfrom Machine mart for £18, it does seem masochistic to use paper or waterstones.

I have to agree with Chris. I have a bench grinder that looks identical to the Clarke one in his link, although mine is branded Nu-Tool and was even cheaper. Over time I have changed grinding wheels, I now have a white 60g AlOx wheel, and I have added a Veritas tool rest and a Tormek Anglemaster for accurately and repeatably setting primary bevel angles. With this set-up there is absolutely no danger of overheating the steel if you place a finger tip just behind the edge while grinding. If you start to feel the heat, stop and cool the blade. It will be too hot to touch long before it gets hot enough to damage the temper of the blade. It can still take a while this way if you are refurbishing an old plane iron, like some if the ones I have rescued from oblivion via Ebay, where it's hard to tell if it's a plane iron or a short saw, but you really only need to do that once in the life of the tool, unless you really abuse your tools.
To save bench space I have my grinder and tool rest mounted on a board, a bit like a big bench hook and when I'm not using it (most of the time) it sits up on a shelf. When in action the board gets clamped to the bench top to stop it wandering.

 

[jonbikebod]

Tnimble,
I got two grades 220 grit and 400 grit. Now I wish I had got something a bit courser as well but my suitcases were up to max weight. 3M Product code is 216U for both grits. They work exceedingly well for things like putting a camber on a blade and back flattening; a bit too fine for flattening cast iron plane soles though.
If you do manage to source any more, please post the details as I am sure I am not the only one who would like to know.
Cheers,
Jon.

 

[tnimble]

jonbikebod: According to the information I got The 216U Gold sheets, rolls or discs are available in europe as 216U gold but only with a 4mm foam backing. Without the foam backing the product code for europe is 255P Gold 'production', the products 255P and 255P Fre-Cut are different. The 255P gold is available from grit P40 up to P600 as paper sheets, paper sheet with adhesive or with velcro. All types packaged in boxes or on rolls.

 

[jonbikebod]

Thanks for that tnimble.
I did find a spec sheet but no one selling the rolls in the UK. This is not the first time I have met this situation.
Cheers,
Jon.