Thread: Love for washitas and alternatives

TJ

I have not used oil stones for a long while so perhaps I am out of order with my comments. As far as flattening is concerned, have you tried using a diamond plate as these are typically used for flattening water stones? I suspect you would need a coarse plate to avoid clogging if you are using oil. I noted that Arkansas stones can use either oil or water for the lubricant. I believe that the Washita stones theoretically can use water or oil, but in practice oil performs better, perhaps because of their porosity.

Regards
Paul

Apparently my question was unclear. Sorry.

What's a good intermediate stone between the grinder and the fine honing stones?

Not grinding the edge off and starting with the fine india is what I would do. if a washita is strong cutting and the steel involved has no significant carbide volume that isn't iron carbides, then a washita can do this alone, but it does require more frequent grinding and avoiding edge damage.

I would say a fine india cutting right is about the same speed as a 1000 grit waterstone, which if said waterstone is a strong cutter (bester 1200 or shapton 1000 pro, for example), the waterstone will be a step below fresh sandpaper. Fresh sandpaper has the advantage of being able to push the abrasive up and be 100% abrasive density with engineered space/conditions around the abrasive.

Loose diamonds on a very hard surface are also extremely harsh like this, though some of the abrasion is rolling and you have to manage the slurry in trade for constant (extreme nuisance) changing of paper.

I go from a 120 grit diamond disc when making tools (either 8 or ten inches spinning at 550rpm) straight to the fine india stone. If the stone is a little tired, I scuff it with an old DMT 220 grit diamond hone, but with some bias toward the edges/corners so that the stone cuts reasonably deeply in the india stone. you could potentially experiment by buying white alundum from a soap supply place, and lay that on the india stone to use to both cut something and to freshen up the stone. it wouldn't have the habit of silicon carbide grit, which would be to break down, plug the india stone temporarily and also cut the abrasive finer as it was breaking down.

Nothing is faster than paper. Nobody ever believes me when I say that, but if you want all out speed, mirka gold fresh and new is ridiculous. At speed on a high speed contact wheel, I'm pretty sure I could grind an 8" nicholson file down the tang remaining only in five minutes. Would be a huge waste of the belt, but nothing cuts like a ceramic belt at speed. Nothing abrades skin off as fast and deep, either.

I think there is improvement here with the india stone and the washita that will be missed opportunity if you move on too quickly.

if you want a strong cutting waterstone, the shapton 1k pro (should be about $35-$40 somewhere) or the bester 1200 are both good. The latter needs soaked - it's a vitrified stone as far as I can tell, kind of like an india stone with no filling in it to stop the oil from draining out (if you use an oilstone that's lost it's jelly center, you'll be getting some vaseline to ....

..just kidding...vaseline to put back into the stone, not to ben dover).

The shapton pro is resin bound, but it's aggressive. Both will need regular flattening, but the out of flatness that they get is less than many others - it just needs to be part of a routine so you don't forget it and hone a flat back a little concave.

So... I decided to cheat. Like you said, give it another try. I lapped it again with Shapton coarse SiC grit, except this time, I just left all the black silicon carbide muck on the stone. Lo-and-behold, this dud of an India stone cuts great, fast, and still fine. I wiped off 120 grit machine marks in a couple dozen passes, but had a finish that cleaned off pretty quickly with a good soft Arkansas.

So, maybe I'll just let it ride and see how this goes for a while. If it slows down or gets weird, I'll dust it with a shake of Shapton fine SiC powder. (I got the powder on clearance about 15 years ago and forgot I had it. I rooted the unopened jars out of the bottom of a box a couple months ago... So 100% sunk cost.)

the more you use both the india and washita, the more you'll get to like both. It's a different thing than friable synthetics where you love them at first and then their inability to hold a shape starts to annoy you.

If you're looking for a temporary charge added to the washita, you can put bonding grade diamonds on it and it will cut far more than just simpler steels and leave a very weird uniform finish that is seconds to bring to a blinding polish with compound or something. It's bonkers easy.

Same stuff can be added to the ruby stone when it slows down (which it does).

The issue with the ruby is that it's really good at what it does, but you can't quite get the same higher speed coarseness out of it unless you just put something on top of it.

I think if you're allowing the work sharp to take the bevel off completely, though, that's something that should be adjusted and then the speed of the stones becomes secondary to the ability to manipulate them.

I've sprinkled silicon carbide on the fine india before when making tools (if there are deep rotary marks from the flattening diamond lap disc, the india stone just doesn't have enough to work through those by itself) but my recollection of what it's like to use more than just one instance isn't there because it's in an IM-313. As soon as the thing gets rotated, most of what's on the stone ends up in the oil catch pan.

Working the fine india in an IM313 is a big step up, too - but they have gone up in price used a whole lot. You can replace some cutting power on the india with "displacement", but the fact that it stays flat when doing toolmaking stuff unlike almost everything else (sandpaper does, but it dubs a little more and one gets tired of pulling up roll and adding more quickly - would be a way different story if sandpaper stayed fresh and new for an hour of heavy work) - the flatness is just as important as the speed for everything but the last stone used.

Hi TJ and DW. Enjoying this discussion. What is a ruby stone?

Overall, the goal is not to have to machine grind the bevels unless there is a problem (damage, angle change, etc). I doubt the coarse SiC powder will be much use dumped straight on the stone. Post lapping, it was pretty well broken down into a layer of fine black muck with a little stray grit mixed in. Perhaps, juicing the India stone with a much finer SiC powder may be fruitful. That would avoid problems with stray grit leaving big boo-boo's.

Assuming I can keep the India stone cutting well, I'm in a pretty good place.

If you're going to grind bevels by hand, the medium crystolon is a good choice, but only in an oil bath like the IM-313. it breaks down and clogs itself with its swarf otherwise.

I've never come across a method that does a good job in regular use except maybe using the crystolon at a slightly shallower angle than the edge.

Warren is the only person I've ever met who has tools similar in sharpness to mine, but from hand sharpening, but he is extremely diligent. I think it's a dead end for most people in terms of results.

Grind shallow and hone steeper without a jig - it's the way it's been done for at least 215 years. Even Nicholson in 1812 prescribed a grind stone and then honing "with the tool lifted closer to vertical". A strange way to put it, but he went to trouble to also describe the grind angle as being one shallow enough that if the tool were honed at such an angle, the edge wouldn't hold up. Nicholson was making a point that there's a sizable gap between the grind angle and the angle that the edge is honed on (and he referred to a turkish oilstone if I recall - something like a finer version of the cretan that's for sale now in europe. I have one of each - but my turkish stone is probably not what people would've considered first quality. The are nearly impossible to find). the useful bit in this whole turkish discussion is the turkish stone is a finisher, albeit a fast one. Nicholson advocated grinding and using only the turkish stone, which would be pretty easy for a skilled user. Grinding and freehanding a bevel on, honing with a washita, and then chasing the burr and polishing the flat side on compound/MDF is a little easier, but proficiency with a washita and a bare strop will lead to an edge that's in the range of an 8k waterstone.

I've received a fair number of tools from people (usually planes with a fitting problem) who wanted to grind and hone by hand only either all on a single bevel or following sellers' description of his own method. Only warren has brought a chisel in here that was actually sharp with good geometry. But I get the sense he does a fair amount of carving along with hand work and likes to sharpen things similarly so he can use the chisel bevel on the wood side a lot (it does result in less edge damage in general for things like waste removal and half blind cutting even though I think it seems counterintuitive to most).

(not dictating, by the way. I've just been through probably 500 stones due to an unhealthy fascination with sharpening things and the toolmaking fuels even more looking at grinding because I obviously have to grind a lot of bevels on hardened steel. ....

just something to have in the back of your mind - it's really hard to beat the edge and the speed coming from the nicholson method, which I considered to be my method - but knowing a zillion other people will land on the same thing.

you can freehand the small honed bevel without any other reference really accurately once you just get used to repetition. I found my edges varied no more than 1 degree when someone asked what angle I honed to . The answer was, I didn't know, whatever the shallowest angle would be that the edge would not fail due to preventable faults.

Taking pictures of the edge against an angle gauge and zooming in showed it to be about 33 degrees.

Interestingly, when i did the whole unicorn thing and used honing guides so someone else could duplicate the test if they disputed the results, most chisels still sustain some damage at 32 and most good chisels don't at 34.

This probably sounds like BS, the taking pictures of the unknown angle was before unicorn and I'm sure it's archived somewhere on WC. certain things just are, and I backed into using a method that nobody really suggests because "there's not enough reference" thinking it must've been done historically if it's supposedly unsavory - it works too well....

.....only to see that nicholson described it almost exactly in 1812. holtzappfel's book recommends the same thing. it seems to disappear from being described so precisely about the same time hand tools took a back seat for most work to power tools.

Which adds more fuel to my superstition that economics drive methods, and not everyone uses the same method, but they get similar results in similar time. If something works better, then suddenly the range of methods that were actually used gets tighter, and you can end up repeating history (a chipbreaker is necessary for any semblance of hand tool work at a productive rate, even though lots of methods actually work. They just won't work for the lazy in 2012 or 2024, and what pleases the lazy was probably necessary for survival when our hobby plane use was mainstream commodity work).