Thread: Chisel Hardness Study, the first step.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Medium crystolon, fine india, vintage washita and 1/2 inch thick 8x2 dans black or dan's translucent.

Any preferred sources? New Washita isn't good?

Cutting with files. Working from your knees. That's so easy to see!
All my freehand was like that until I switched to adzes and crooked knives for carving.
It's just a reverse. Hold the tool steady, move the abrasive.

I believe that you will find scanning electron microscope pictures of steel edges quite revealing.
No subjective opinions from the shed. Leonard Lee's book. How discouraging.

Oil stones are for shaping edges, not refining them. The oil is a carrier for a swarf. Nothing more and nothing less.
Clean, the stone cuts with the grit size it was built with. The exact opposite of a lubricant.
Slurry is a lack of maintenance to my freehand tribe.

To me, a "good" set of oil stones will allow me to repair or reshape an edge.
They are so aggressive that there's no need to tart around being clever.
Other than an axe, they really can't make a fine woodworking edge at all. BUT, you get very close to it, in a hurry.

Cheap hardware store stones and lots of Pennzoil engine motor oil, 5-30 was on hand.
80 grit, then 120 grit then 200 grit. I got the satin finish 20 degree angle I wanted.
Then 3M carbide papers = 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1,500 is the end.
Last but not least for soft carving woods is a hone with something like CrOx/AlOx on a strop.
Leather is too rubbery so I use breakfast cereal box cardboard on a flat slab of granite.

BTW, gluing it down is a myth. Masking tape is every so much more successful.

Couple of pictures:

A2 with voids from the washita:

https://s13.postimg.org/ju2vny1jb/a2_washita_voids.jpg

O1 on washita (this chisel was new, and had some tiny voids on the edge, but they disappeared after a few honings):

https://s13.postimg.org/ofyzwfctj/wa..._AI_Chisel.jpg

eze lap 1200 after stropping. This edge shaves hair well, but has much greater resistance in the cut. As you can see from the light reflection, the thickness of the edge is much greater than the washita (01 chisel, same as above with washita - ashley iles). I should note a sectond time, just how well this chisel shaves hair after removal of the wire edge - it's surprising, despite the thick edge.

https://s13.postimg.org/vxcsp0p1z/1200_Eze_Lap.jpg

And that chisel before wire edge removal:
https://s13.postimg.org/yrfy2l1jr/12...ther_strop.jpg

(one thing about a wire edge of this coarseness - it isn't easily removed just by leather - ignore the name of that picture, it was prior to the leather strop).

Somewhere, I have a picture of an 8K waterstone edge. It's in the same ballpark as the washita, perhaps ever so slightly finer.

Gobs of other ones, too, but they're not relevant here.

Originally Posted by rob streeper

Any preferred sources? New Washita isn't good?

Anything sold new with the name "washita" isn't actually a washita. Norton owns the mine to washita stones and it's closed. they don't think it's worth the effort. Dan's and some other places use the name "washita" stone for some soft novaculite stones, but they are not washita stones - just low density arkansas stones. It sounds like there shouldn't be a difference, but it's significant.

Here is a true washita. It can maintain a japanese chisel on the soft side for japanese chisels (iyoroi) entirely by itself and still have a relatively fine edge.

https://s13.postimg.org/jvhev9ssn/IM...915_202107.jpg

As far as stones, I like dan's specials page, or buying from a third party vendor like taylor tools - for the dan's hard. Dan's regular retail direct price is really high.

The washita has to come used, and the norton fine india and crystolon are cheap, they can come from anywhere.

Interesting. I could see your pic's for a minute and now only links. The Washita at the top looked rough as a cob, what's the magnification?

Okay, are the Pikes branded Washita's in the class you're talking about?

150x true optical. The width of the picture is only about 2 hundredths of an inch from edge to edge. It's actually quite fine, but the tiny thousandth of an inch voids spoil the edge.

Originally Posted by rob streeper

Okay, are the Pikes branded Washita's in the class you're talking about?

Yes. The old pike mine is the one that norton owns.

Pike lilywhite, Pike no 1, mechanic's friend, woodworker's delight, carpenter's delight are some names that they were sold under (anything that says norton or behr manning will also be from the same place, but if it's not a no 1 or lilywhite, it might be fine and slow cutting. There are gobs of older stones with no labels, too, but you have to be able to spot them.

They have been getting more popular, so they're not cheap most of the time.

There was an interesting discussion in another thread on here that got locked. A guy talking about cutting resistance based on edge thickness vs. edge finish or something.

I find those kinds of things interesting, because we don't often talk about thickness of the edge in woodworking vs. finish. Same with bevel edge and wedging, but they have a pronounced effect on how a chisel will wear (thicker edge and higher bevel rely on greater degree of edge refinement to work well).

It's in the same vein as the discussion about simple steels, but I think people are worn out on that!

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

lots of Pennzoil engine motor oil, 5-30 was on hand.

Motor oil!?! Ever have painful inflammation of your finger joints? If I need something that thick that I need to touch with my skin I use USP mineral oil, now it's almost cheaper than motor oil at the farm supply. Not trying to beat you over the head but please be careful with that on your skin.

Originally Posted by D.W.

There was an interesting discussion in another thread on here that got locked. A guy talking about cutting resistance based on edge thickness vs. edge finish or something.

I find those kinds of things interesting, because we don't often talk about thickness of the edge in woodworking vs. finish. Same with bevel edge and wedging, but they have a pronounced effect on how a chisel will wear (thicker edge and higher bevel rely on greater degree of edge refinement to work well).

It's in the same vein as the discussion about simple steels, but I think people are worn out on that!

Well, let's face it woodworking cutting edges don't exactly qualify as social conversation. I need to add an appropriate piece of W1 to my stock for making my planned test chisels. Last time I looked 1" wasn't cataloged.

My sole allergy is a contact allergy to epoxy adhesives. We used Araldite as an embedding medium for transmission electron microscopy.
hem as embedding medium.
BTW, light microscope micrographs cannot match the resolution of scanning electron microscope images of steel edges.
Same as with sharpening = steel is not crystalline. All you and I can do is shred the edge.

Flint stone, obsidian and glasses break along molecular lines that we can't create in steel. Diamond is ever so much better than that.
You ever cut up lots of raw meat with flint blades for suppers? I've never used edges so sharp. Unmatched by any steel by definition.
As I never plan on doing hair protein carvings, I don't do hair protein carving tests as any measure of the steel edges that I make.

Measure the steels. Mark their performances in the woods of choice. Be mindful of the chemistry to make and also hold an edge.
I never see more than 30-40 minutes. Should make some sort of a pressure gauge to record the "push" in carving.

Originally Posted by D.W.

eze lap 1200 after stropping.

https://s13.postimg.org/vxcsp0p1z/1200_Eze_Lap.jpg

I don't know if this adds anything to the discussion, but here is the finish off a #12,000 stone (10x finer than DW's Eze lap 1200).

No visible abrasions in either image at the following magnifications.

First at 60X shows grain and second at 200x starts to show particles. Steel was HSS. Stone was Hishiboshi Karasu waterstone.

Scraper - polished to #12000 - 60 X to show metal grain.jpg Scraper - polished to #12000 - before burr.jpg

Very interesting... I was not expecting to see a steel grain quite so coarse or carbide particles quite so large...

So out of curiosity - I looked up the ASTM grain size chart... I was amazed that even "Fine Grained" steel has quite large grain... I was expecting sub-micron.. Not even close....

"Fine grained" steel means ASTM 7 to 9 grain - 32microns to 16 microns... Or for those of us metrically deficient 0.0013" to 0.0006" average grain size...

So say the A2 carbides popping out of matrix are 0.001". That's right in the middle of "Fine grained"... Theoretically OK so far as the spec reads "fine grained" - but it points out that the real problem isn't pure "grain size" alone....

It takes my mind back around to 3 other considerations:
-You sharpen the edge way down below 32 or 16 microns...
-The sharpenability of the hard stuff in it is important - can you sharpen the carbides or do they simply pop out?
and a lot of that depends in real life on:
-The softness of the surrounding matrix - does the bulk of carbon in the steel segregate out into these super hard carbide grains or do you at least still have some eutectic level of carbon dissolved in the steel + softer carbides to keep the harder carbides from popping out?

Luckily - it seems like some this has already been worked out for us...
Cryo treatment of alloys like A2 is supposed to help all these things
PM steel with appropriate heat treatment certainly does also
And
Traditional Japanese techniques ends up going at it from a different though completely valid way as well...