Do diamond grit sharpening stones wear out?

[bugbear]

I suspect even if you don't bear down hard normally during honing that the axe and drawknives might be responsible for more that their fair share of the damage. With a tool of much inherent weight or where you can bear down on it with two handles it may be worth altering your honing style from back-and-forth to side-to-side.

Good point on the weight of the axe - but worse, since the edge is curved (and the bevel may be rounded), the contact area might be very small, leading to extremely high localised pressures.

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

Slightly off the point but I've been using the same three 3m diapad diamond pads red/yellow/black for 20 years or so. Bought to polish up some Derbyshire Marble fire places and floor slabs but used since to refresh Norton oil stones.
The diapads are bendy and follow the hollows so you don't have to flatten the oil stones. They last for life (the oils stones that is), and the diapads are also doing OK so far!

 

[Dokkodo]

It could just be a weakness in the stones themselves, or you may bear down too hard without realising it.

How hard is too hard? I guess that's hard to quantify. I dont feel like I put crazy amounts of pressure down, I do that intentionally when stropping. The axe/drawknifes are literally just once or twice. I blame the stones. (hammer)

 

[woodbrains]

Hello,

I have only a little experience with diamond stones; a couple of the folding DMT ones for small tools. They definitely wear in from their initial coarseness and get a little smoother. I don't know if this is just an indicator of their wear characteristics, as if they wear initially in a noticeable way then they must wear!

However, I do believe there are different grades of diamond, so it is worth checking. I guess the expensive ones use monocrystaline diamonds and the cheaper ones do not. Polycrystaline diamonds will fracture and break away, so wear out quicker.

Mike.

 

[patrickjchase]

I think the problem with new stones is that the abrasive is stacked up a bit on the surface so for a little while it is very aggressive, I have always found though that it soon levels off and then they behave more like the stated grit and seem to last a very long time.

This is about right. DMT uses electroplated Nickel as a substrate to hold the diamonds. Like almost everybody who uses that process (with the possible exception of Atoma) they seem to have issues where a very small percentage of particles sort of "float" near the surface of the Nickel and sit proud of their neighbors, causing deep scratches. The good news is that those particles are weakly attached and fall out during break-in.