Thread: PM 10V tool steel in low angle jack

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Try this:

headband magnifier head wearing jeweler reading magnifying glass loupe optivisor | eBay

At least four suppliers, although not the seller we used. Just check that the lens are glass.

Regards
Paul

Plastic or polycarbonate is ok if you wash them before you wipe them with a CLEAN cotton cloth. 50 years of, really anal about scratches, glasses wearer exerience...


To be honest, I'd be surprised if you could find glass lenses

Originally Posted by IanW

Good luck, SD! It is available commercially, but you have to search for it and if my experience is anything to go by much of what you will get tends to be young re-growth stuff that is less dense & less likely to be figured. It's still good to work with hand tools, & still excellent cabinet wood (I used some for the sides of the desk I'm sitting at as I type), but it tends to be much more straight-grained & a bit bland in comparison with the figured stuff.

I've got a small pile of wide boards (350mm) from what must have been a grand-daddy of a tree that is ear-marked for a couple of special projects, but after that's used up it may be a long while before I stumble on any more of this quality!

Cheers,

I might have to start raiding queenslanders in the middle of the night and strip their siding... ;-)

I beat this drum often, but when we're talking about sharpening, I think the really cheap hand held scopes (some plug into computers, some plug into both phones and computers) that are about $15 and 75x optical (they'll claim numbers up to 1000x, but that's digital and unless things have changed, the sensor resolution and lens quality won't allow it) are worth using to refine a process.

You don't have to use them long - just to confirm that you can create an edge that's uniform end to end with no notches, etc. That gives you a starting point and then you can use an iron for the dulling cycle and have a couple of looks at it to see what it's doing. If an iron chips or folds, you're not getting your "money's worth" in terms of sharpening time and you'll have to sharpen 2-5 times as much metal off to refresh.

This is one of the reasons I don't use much coarse grained super steel (despite having used it a lot in the past). As the volume of hand work increases, you get lazier with sharpening.

A loupe is OK, but a hand scope will show you a whole lot more (you'll have other opportunities to use it).

I'll show you the kinds of things you'll see in the next two pictures (these are metallurgical scope pictures, but you'll see almost as good of pictures from a cheap hand scope).
I like to use autosol or dursol on wood for plane irons (I don't usually buff them unless there's a wood that's dirty and will nick edges).

Here's what dursol looks like on wood:
dursol 10 more seconds on harder syp.jpg

Here's what it looks like if you use it on cast iron (where its 3 micron or so size is suddenly apparent because it can't embed like it does in wood):


dursol on cast.jpg

I can't say for sure that particular nick (which is about 2 thousandths deep) is from something on cast or a leftover nick, but when sharpening on cast (if not being very careful to clear it), it's definitely harder to sharpen defect free than it is to use a stone and then a fine abrasive on wood. The edge is otherwise pretty good, despite the nick.

I don't have pictures of incomplete edges, but when I first got a scope, I found all of the things I was speculating on (immediate microchipping, etc, initial sharpness issues) were generally lack of finishing sharpening. I've never received an iron from anyone that was actually finished with good clearance, which is a shame because it doesn't take any more effort (probably less) to narrow down the method to always yield the first picture (about 1 minute of honing on a carbon steel iron, less on a chisel - it's just getting it in the right place).

If I had V10, though, I'd use cast and 1 micron diamonds after a diamond hone, because the edge will be the quality of the first picture and the extra time won't so much be in the finishing, just before it.

The scopes I'm talking about on ebay are about 1 inch in diameter and look like cigars. If you're shopping for one, cheap is good (the more expensive ones are usually just marked up versions of the same core, so an $80 version and a $15 version aren't much different), and make sure the listing states the scopes will be supported by your operating system/PC/phone - whatever you intend to use. Some of the stuff being sold can lack support for older or newer systems. For my more expensive (but not expensive for the type) metallurgical scope, a dying PC forced buying a new camera (because the old one was a good top tube camera, but doesn't have energy saving communication bits that windows 10 requires). Unfortunately, turret cameras are a lot more expensive, so a mediocre one is more like $200.

Just as an aside, the two irons shown above look the same to the naked eye and loupes.

You can get creative and pair a phone camera with a loupe, though, and get a lot of magnification in combination. Just the phone alone can see things you can't see by eye.

Looking forward to this.

Going to try Autosol 75ml and a nice piece of merbau hardwood to see if I cant get more pizzazz out of my edges.



edit - here is a well reviewed scope. I assume it is the type you suggest DW.

It will be excellent to use on ones phone, but ensure it runs OTG magnification commands. One can do this with this ap.

Also, it was suggested within comments to grab an Endoscope Ap for noodling.



https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon....11Mo4vII2S.mp4

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Looking forward to this.

Going to try Autosol 75ml and a nice piece of merbau hardwood to see if I cant get more pizzazz out of my edges.



edit - here is a well reviewed scope. I assume it is the type you suggest DW.

It will be excellent to use on ones phone, but ensure it runs OTG magnification commands. One can do this with this ap.

Also, it was suggested within comments to grab an Endoscope Ap for noodling.



https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon....11Mo4vII2S.mp4

Yessir - that's the kind of scope. They can be used on those stands, or just in hand. If you have realtime video on a phone or PC you just move them around adjust focus and then snap a picture from the livestream video. They work really well and will show you thinks you may not be able to see through a loupe.

This is, in my opinion, where you can do something that answers questions and one unit of effort (Be it seeing that you're not sharpening fully to the edge, or not sharpening damage out, and then getting real lazy and figuring out how to solve those problems without adding time to sharpening) and you get back 10 or 100 of results.

It's prevented me from making inaccurate statements, too - especially in regard to the chippiness of steels - a lot of observed chipping in high wear steels is just failure to remove the accumulated damage because the steel abrades more slowly. BTDT. And you get a good sense of actually finishing an edge and removing wear from the very highly alloyed steels - if we do something 20% longer, it feels like we've done a lot extra - but finding out you actually have to double the physical effort and then counting strokes to do it, you realize it's a real drag.

There's a poster in the US who continues to contend that A2 steel chips all the time and cannot deliver a clear surface on wood because he sees lines on planed boards at LN events. It would be easy to believe that's the case. Except if you have a scope like this and bother to hone the extra needed to remove all of the nicking that accumulates, you find that it doesn't actually chip that easily. LN's objection to using a grinder to speed up the honing process probably results in never sharpening damage out (and most people going to a demo won't know the difference in the first place).



(autosol is just super dandy stuff on wood. if you take a mostly finished edge to it and give the edge 10 seconds on the autsol, it'll be super smooth and even).

as a follow up - I got my new vial of diamonds yesterday. I already have used the seller I linked before, so no questions about quality. While looking at the delivery notice, ebay gave me a listing of someone in china selling graded lapidary grit with shipping for something like $10 per 100 carats.

So, I ordered 1/2 micron diamond (their grading of grits was odd - they classified #1 as 8000 grit. #1 closely graded diamond should be treading in territory that a shapton 30k is in based on my images, so I ordered 0.5 and will see how good it is.

Given that it's coming from china for pennies, if it's properly rated and it's consistent, it could be a very good option for you guys in australia. 100 carats is a decade's worth, even with wood - on cast iron, it's a lifetime's worth, and it's sold for lapidary/faceting, so I'll be surprised if it's junk.

It's certainly the case that a vendor could sell #1 as particles ranging between 1 and 2 microns, though. we'll see. That's not an issue of dishonesty as the cost is about the same for the different grades - just convention.

Alright, reporting back with some results.

Basically it worked quite well.
I found a couple offcuts of terrazzo tile. These are basically natural stone aggregate suspended in what I imagine is stone dust and an adhesive. I chose this over the natural quartzite purely because there were two pieces which happened to be exactly the right size, meaning I didn't need to make a mess with an angle grinder. I flattened these with 300 diamond plate. I could tell the aggregate was plenty hard enough. It took only a few mins to flatten them, but could feel they're much harder than my Shapton 8000.

Here's what I did:
- Ground a fresh burr on the existing 35 degree microbevel with 300 grit diamond plate. This took a while, but it's because I'm being very fussy about grinding it square.
- Polished 35 degree MB with 1000 grit diamond. Few minutes.
- Removed the wire burr on 1000 grit diamond
- Charged a tile with 8000 grit (~3 micron) diamond paste, then worked the leading edge on the back of the plane iron using ruler trick. Few minutes.
- Charged a tile with 14,000 grit (~1 micron) diamond paste and moved the microbevel knob to 6 o'clock position on Veritas MkII
- Polished a small tertiary bevel (I guess around 37 degrees or so). Few minutes.

This was significantly easier, and quite a bit faster than my experiences with the ceramic stones. It was straight forward and uncomplicated.
More importantly, it's certainly the sharpest result so far. I guess that's to be expected, since I was only polishing to 8000 on ceramic. Anyway, it feel much, much better to use. I'm meeting far less resistance, and easily able to get whispy 0.05mm shavings from edge and end grain with no problems.

Here's a few pics.

Bevels
IMG_0624.jpeg

Back
IMG_0625.jpeg

Shaving
IMG_0626.jpeg

I'm happy with this, and it will be how I sharpen this particular blade from here on. I will no doubt experiment a bit with angles to find the sweet spot of durability etc.

Thanks for the tips everyone. Especially you, DW. I'm very happy to have found a workable method for quickly and easily sharpening this steel.

1 micron diamonds on a hard surface if they're not rolling may create a finer apex than anything I've used in stones or oxides, even though the latter can be finer (they'd be too slow to use - the oxides - as a finish step)

The hard surface just allows a very fine edge to be created, even if it has a little bit of tooth compared to something optically smooth.

That would be the reason that the edge feels sharper (and it should feel a full notch smoother and sharper and hold that smoothness and sharpness better than an 8k shapton.

Most importantly, it will create that sharpness on a steel filled with vanadium carbides because as hard as the vanadium carbides are, they are cut and rowed by diamonds like nothing.

Fascinating stuff.

RogerWilco, did you acquire your diamond pastes locally?

D.W. I found a good supplier in China. Nice and cheap. 1pcs Diamond Polishing Grinding Paste Water Oil Dual Used 60g For Jade Emerald Mirror Surface Agate Metal Mould Stainless Steel|Abrasives| - AliExpress

Any recommendations on hardwood? Just something hard I'd imagine, such as Merbau....(?)

With diamonds, the harder the wood, the better

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Fascinating stuff.

RogerWilco, did you acquire your diamond pastes locally?

yep, gemcuts.com.au

probably not the cheapest, but they specify they use de beers diamond powders which are known to be good quality and graded accurately. They seek pastes in syringes, which is very convenient. I also bought 10 carats of powder. I’ve used pastes before and sometimes it can get a bit gummy... But I like a paste because it acts both as a lubricant and a suspension to contain the diamonds powder. The idea of having both means I have the convenience of paste, but can also top up with powder or add extra lubrication (camellia oil is what I have) as needed.

I found that 8000 grit was pretty user friendly and the paste didn’t need any tinkering. Just a few drops of oil to keep things moving. 15000 though is quite slippy and gummy. Next time I need to, I’ll just add dry powder to get it back to a slightly more grippy consistency.