Flattening a Hard Silicon Carbide Honing Stone

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Personally, I appreciate the lower level of moderation on this forum. Variety is nice, and some of the forums that are overmoderated pretty much cut off any discussion where something could actually be learned at the end - those overmoderated forums are set up to snag beginners to please advertisers. We know Charlie likes the mud, nobody learned differently here about that, but maybe some folks found the bits in the middle interesting. I always do. You don't have to roll in the mud with Charlie - we're adults and can ignore that part.
 
Steve Voigt":ic2oki50 said:
And with that, I think I'll take my leave. On every other forum I've ever been on, the moderators moderated. They were neutral and restrained; they never belittled or bullied or berated the participants, or called them "asinine" or "absurd." It's a nice tag team Jacob and you have going, sort of a good cop/ bad cop thing, but it sure poisons the whole atmosphere. I appreciate that I had a chance to make my point; now I'll leave it up to others to decide for themselves. Besides, I have planes to make.

The Charley at the top of this forum listed as a moderator is definitely a different person than Charlie Stanford.

Stick around. CS is often dormant (and usually better behaved than you may remember from various other forums), and Jacob might come across the wrong way in this discussion, he's not a bad fellow.
 
DW; I can offer you this fact; there is no way the results from my trialling a coarser grit sic powder will be posted on this forum site.

Stewie;
 
swagman":io33ib2b said:
DW; I can offer you this fact; there is no way the results from my trialling a coarser grit sic powder will be posted on this forum site.

Stewie;

That's OK, Stewie. Everyone chooses their own road (and such results have been described elsewhere...coarse silicon carbide is the standard on razor forums for hard stones and if anyone is curious and has google, they will find such results elsewhere). The discussion is the same elsewhere, someone blows out a diamond plate on a coarse or aggressive stone and coarse silicon carbide is offered as the appropriate medium.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsjFhtE4o8

80 grit SiC on a 150 grit stone side. This guy is doing the same thing, on glass, but to a new stone and he's sharpening knives. Why someone would go to this length of trouble to sharpen knives freehand is confusing to me (I asked him in another video, not to snark him, but just out of curiosity - he hasn't answered yet but I'd imagine he will).

Nonetheless, the method is shown and could be useful if someone is using these stones to flatten the backs of new tools. I've never had a lot of favor for them for doing that because coarse aluminum oxide paper works so well for that, as do loose diamonds, (and SiC stones seem to allow flat surfaces to ride on the swarf if the surface gets large enough - and without an oily swarf, they load instead with their own broken grit) but in case someone would...
 
swagman":39cahp3y said:
This is even more asinine than the fellow who ruined his DMT flattening his SiC stone.

Charles; for someone who is so confident within his own abilities you sure lack a lot of spunk when it comes to exhibiting examples of your own work. If I recall; the excuse you gave last time was you had no idea how to attach photo's to a thread; advise was given; you then posted 2 photo's; one of you dressed up as a church leader; and the other was of you standing beside your work bench. No relevance to what was being asked of you.

Stewie;

Custom kitchen at the moment Stewie, you?
 
CStanford":2hs8fhez said:
swagman":2hs8fhez said:
This is even more asinine than the fellow who ruined his DMT flattening his SiC stone.

Charles; for someone who is so confident within his own abilities you sure lack a lot of spunk when it comes to exhibiting examples of your own work. If I recall; the excuse you gave last time was you had no idea how to attach photo's to a thread; advise was given; you then posted 2 photo's; one of you dressed up as a church leader; and the other was of you standing beside your work bench. No relevance to what was being asked of you.

Stewie;

Custom kitchen at the moment Stewie, you?


Give us some details, Charlie.
 
CStanford":21qovowl said:
What you want to see? How about a PDF of the signed contract for the work? Will that do?

Here's one from the other end of the room:


Why would we care about the contract?

More about the center island, why it's open on the bottom, what it's made of (pine?), etc. Work on site, or done elsewhere and brought in? Cabinets part of the job, or were they there before or manufactured elsewhere and brought in. You know, the details of actually doing the job.
 
swagman":1besuvml said:
DW; I can offer you this fact; there is no way the results from my trialling a coarser grit sic powder will be posted on this forum site.

Stewie;

Hello,

And this would be a shame. It might have had some practical use for someone, somewhere, rather than just the unfounded speculation from others. I'm sorry, Stewie.

Mike.
 
The island was assembled on site. Homeowner deciding on trim/base for the feet and the countertop material, there have been several change orders, materials are eastern white pine, soft maple, hard maple (drawer runners), and poplar. The bulk of what you are seeing is the pine. The white cabs are custom as well and they're painted poplar doors, boxes are of course plywood.

Needless to say, these were not made with all hand tools.
 
CStanford":333ga9zv said:
Needless to say, these were not made with all hand tools.

You don't say, I'd never believe anyone works with anything but them. Of course, you could probably post a lot more than two lines about a job like that, and people might find it interesting. Even if half of the job was MDF.

I do recall when you were logged in as the "800 pound gorilla" or whatever handle you used on knots, you mentioned that you were on the forums to take shots at people and not to offer advice or talk woodwork, as you said, other people are around to do that.

For what it's worth, I agree with your advice in this thread - I'd buy a new one of these stones before spending much time on it. I got a bag full of stones from a machine shop at one point where it was evident that they felt the same way - cheaper to get another stone than stop the production and figure out how to flatten or condition them.

Sure would be a lot more instructive if you spent half the time talking about stuff like the kitchen details vs. what you spend entertaining yourself trying to win a game that nobody else is playing.

I don't think most here will hold their breath.
 
I do recall when you were logged in as the "800 pound gorilla" or whatever handle you used on knots, you mentioned that you were on the forums to take shots at people and not to offer advice or talk woodwork, as you said, other people are around to do that.

WTF Charles. Zero respect.
 
Well David your memory is certainly better than mine with regard to Knots. I don't remember you from Knots at all but don't take it personally. I'm sure that if I made that statement it was tongue-in-cheek at the time but turned out to be somewhat prescient I guess. I don't recall posting as the "800 pound gorilla" I went by CStanford for the longest time until the moderating got extremely heavy-handed. I do remember giving out plenty of woodworking advice, frankly advice at that time I probably had no business giving. Probably applies as much today as it did then. Pot shots for sure, when stuff just seemed silly and ran contrary to my reading and common sense. (like practically everybody in the US I'm self-taught).

There are lots of people building much more involved kitchens than the one I've posted today, and the commercial woodworking forums like WoodWeb are where one should hang out to learn about doing very high end kitchens (which mine are not), yacht cabinetry, etc. My preference, by far, would be to do nothing but standalone furniture but my ego has yet to overcome the needs of my stomach, though it's not for lack of trying.

I have a little spec piece going in the home shop now that hopefully I'll finish in a reasonable amount of time. Nothing complicated, it'll be a painted piece, but done with all hand tools. We'll probably keep it most likely -- a piece for the kitchen or an informal dining room.
 
Jacob":3gk75y64 said:
woodbrains":3gk75y64 said:
......
Finally, Jacob despite repeating ad nauseum about unnecessary flattening, cannot find a single person or piece of literature to back the claim.....
Not true. According to Steve Voigt Holtzapffel agrees with me; vol.3 (1850), p.1142, t "even distribution of wear" is important. Which is all I'm saying. You just need to evenly distribute wear, to a greater or lesser extent according to what you do. If you need to flatten you have been doing it wrong.

Hello,

No one is denying that evenly distributing wear is a good thing. Guess what, we all do it! But trying to keep the stone as flat as possible in use INFORMS that the stone should be flat, by inference. So what if, in several years of use, besides wide plane irons, we have sharpened firmer gouges, 1/4 in chisels and 3/16 plough plane blades etc. etc. are we really going to have distributed the wear across the entire stone, have we really not been doing it right? Of course not. So we must conclude that (at least some) stones need to be flat and sometimes they need to be flattened, or replaced with flat ones.

Mike.
 
Well, again, one uses both sides of the stone and refrains from doing gouges etc. on both sides. This can be a bit hard to keep track of until a stone has had many years of wear -- sides that is. Just take the tiniest nick out of one corner of the stone on one side and designate that side the gouge side or the flat side.

Look, here's the thing, this is a glass half full/glass half empty proposition. Most stones exhibit a lot of wear on one side in the form of some sort of trough or set of grooves. The other side is often pristine. Instead of saying, "wow, this guy really kept his stone flat, we're getting all exercised about the side with the swale. Might be best just to put that side out of one's mind and dwell on the flat side and let the imagination run wild with it, for a change.
 
CStanford":h4b3goid said:
Well David your memory is certainly better than mine with regard to Knots. I don't remember you from Knots at all but don't take it personally. I'm sure that if I made that statement it was tongue-in-cheek at the time but turned out to be somewhat prescient I guess. I don't recall posting as the "800 pound gorilla" I went by CStanford for the longest time until the moderating got extremely heavy-handed. I do remember giving out plenty of woodworking advice, frankly advice at that time I probably had no business giving. Probably applies as much today as it did then. Pot shots for sure, when stuff just seemed silly and ran contrary to my reading and common sense. (like practically everybody in the US I'm self-taught).

There are lots of people building much more involved kitchens than the one I've posted today, and the commercial woodworking forums like WoodWeb are where one should hang out to learn about doing very high end kitchens (which mine are not), yacht cabinetry, etc. My preference, by far, would be to do nothing but standalone furniture but my ego has yet to overcome the needs of my stomach, though it's not for lack of trying.

I have a little spec piece going in the home shop now that hopefully I'll finish in a reasonable amount of time. Nothing complicated, it'll be a painted piece, but done with all hand tools. We'll probably keep it most likely -- a piece for the kitchen or an informal dining room.

Well, "the regular work", as you say, not high end kitchens, is probably a lot more interesting to most people. Not many of us are thinking of copying a $200,000 kitchen, but doing something that looks like a $50,000 kitchen could certainly be useful.

I don't disagree about the business aspect - build what pays. You have a wife and kids. If it can be satisfying at the same time, great.

I've got a kitchen to finish and some floors to redo. My floors have been sanded twice already, so the methods will be a bit less heavy handed in wood removal. I thought about making a post claiming that I would redo the entire floor with a red devil scraper, but I just don't have it today.

I personally would much rather see detail about the regular jobs than the fanciful stuff. If we want to be wowed, we can go to George. If we want to see a 1000 square foot kitchen with 40 cabinets passed off is middle class fare, we can go to any number of home magazines or HGTV home makeover things.

(not sure why I remember the knots forum post ("BossCrunk"), maybe because I was surprised at how long the debate went on when they chucked your handle on there, and you were able to simply create another ID and post in the middle of the same thread! I don't know why I remember such things, they're not what I'd choose to fill my head with, but they're there, anyway).
 
Oh yes, BossCrunk -- seemed like it was pretty much at the tail end of it all though I don't really have a sense of the timeline from beginning to end of my participation over there. I heard they're shutting Knots down formally and for good.

I'll do some more pictures as the kitchen wraps up. We're not going out until late next week I don't think. Depends on a couple of other trades. It's raining today, otherwise I'd probably play a little golf or at least hit a few.

I need to resurrect the old BossCrunk moniker. Used to make me chuckle. It's a play on 'Boss Crump' (E.H. Crump) who was an old political boss in Memphis in the 1930s and 1940s I guess. Look him up. He was quite a character. I dated his great granddaughter in college. She was what one calls 'uninhibited.'
 
CStanford":6yae7shg said:
Oh yes, BossCrunk -- seemed like it was pretty much at the tail end of it all though I don't really have a sense of the timeline from beginning to end of my participation over there. I heard they're shutting Knots down formally and for good.

I'll do some more pictures as the kitchen wraps up. We're not going out until late next week I don't think. Depends on a couple of other trades. It's raining today, otherwise I'd probably play a little golf or at least hit a few.

I have seen that before (I thought it had already closed). Their interpretation is that everyone is going to instagram or something. Their forum format is hard to read, other forums seem to be doing fine. This one's doing quite well, and the beginner traps elsewhere seem to have no trouble collecting new posters.

All BS aside, I'd certainly appreciate the regular jobs. Even a post about them would be fine - doesn't have to be a 40 picture spread on a blog.

Style down there is a bit different than here, but the kitchen looks nice. It doesn't look like it came out of an RTA box.
 

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