" wrote:
Steve LaMantia or last name close to that keep popping up on the
original writer/author.
OK, Here's the REPRINT of Steve's original. I guess we need to
reprint it, and a few other things, about once a year. How's
about the turd barge or the Klown Hammah.
Dave in Fairfax
================================================== ==
Stephen LaMantia
Nov 1 1995, 12:00 am
Newsgroups: rec.woodworking
From: (Stephen LaMantia)
Date: 1995/11/01
Subject: Sandpaper Sharpening
[No, you can't sharpen sandpaper. And please don't ask me how I
know that.]
[Required warnings:]
[If you don't like sharpening tales, or sandpaper, or
handplanes, or any deviation from simple declarative
sentences, please don't read this post. Also, it's a
process gloat, and it's windbaggy, so be forewarned.]
[And if you prefer one-clause synopses, he "I sharpened
a plane blade with sandpaper." Now move along now.]
For anyone else:
I recently emailed a few folks about some attempts I made at
sharpening a plane iron with sandpaper. Some suggested I post my
story to the group. So here it is.
(Rich and David, I've pretty much rehashed my email to you guys
here, so you can move on out now, too.)
Let's see. Who's left? Oh.
Dear Mom,
I've recently been experimenting with using sandpaper for honing.
I had been getting tired out with the oilstones getting unflat and
glazed and needing to be lapped all the time, tired of oil all
over
the place and on my hands so I couldn't even scratch, tired of
having to clean the stones after each use, tired of having to keep
a conscious effort going to distribute wear on the stones evenly.
So tired of all of this.
So I started thinking about abrasives and abrasive action in
general, and read up a bit, and asked around, and found out that
there's nothing different, in principle, between sandpaper and an
oilstone. Silicon carbide sandpaper (i.e., wet-or-dry) goes up to
600 grit in the hardware and woodworking stores, but up to 2000
grit in the automotive finishing stores, as I learned from David
Opincarne, a local rec.woodworker and admitted metalhead who works
right here at the school and who sent me some 1200-and 2000-grit
samples and who's recently been helping me greatly to understand
the secrets of metal. For example, did you know that to produce
high-carbon steel, crushed bone from the skull of an infidel is an
excellent carburizing agent? Me, neither. Or that hardening the
steel in cutting blades is achieved by the sudden and even cooling
of the blade, and that the best known way to achieve these dual
goals is to quench the blade in the still-living body of an enemy
warrior? Same here; I had no idea. David's been teaching me a
lot.
Me and him and some other wreck.the.woodwork folks had been
talking
lately about this abrasive business, and it got onto sandpaper
somehow, and so I decided to test something out. For the
sharpening-with-sandpaper experiment, I used a slightly-pitted 2"
wide jack plane blade that came with an old beat-up Stanley
Bedrock
#605 I bought last year at a tool swap. The bevel on the plane
iron had been somehow ground *concave* by the previous owner (or
else it just wore that way), so I first straightened the edge out
on the grinding wheel, grinding in straight at first so as not to
create a thin edge that would burn, and then grinding in a bevel
but stopping a bit short of a real edge, again to prevent burning.
Because of this care not to burn the steel, this grinding goes
slow
and light, but it's time well spent.
Time now to lap the back behind the cutting bevel. I took a page
out of the plane-sole lapping book -- figuratively speaking of
course, you should never tear pages out of a book -- and used very
light coatings of 3M "77" spray adhesive to temporarily glue small
1-1/2" x 3-1/2" rectangular pieces of sandpaper along the edge of
a
sheet of 1/4" plate-glass. The paper I used was Aluminum Oxide in
grits 50, 80, and 100, and Silicon Carbide (wet-or-dry to you
laypeople) in grits of 150, 180, 220, 320, 400, 600, 1200, and
2000. The plate glass was placed with its edge flush to the edge
of the workbench.
I lapped the end one inch of the back of the iron on each grit in
turn. I didn't use any water; I just went at it dry. So as I
lapped -- can you call it lapping if it's dry? -- anyway, about
every ten seconds or so I'd stop and brush off the sandpaper with
a
whisk broom and wipe the blade off on my shirt. (On the coarser
grits, I found that a dustbuster vacuum actually cleaned up the
paper quite thoroughly, much better than sweeping it off, but this
sucking advantage disappeared at around 220 grit.) Since I
progressed through the grits so gradually, I found I had to spend
only about a minute or so on each grit, including the suck-down
and
sweep-off and shirt-wipe time.
One trick to efficiency is knowing when you've lapped the back
sufficiently on each progressive grit. I had previously had
trouble gauging this, and didn't know how
--
Dave Leader
reply-to doesn't work
use:
daveldr at att dot net
American Association of Woodturners
http://www.woodturner.org
Capital Area Woodturners
http://www.capwoodturners.org/
PATINA
http://www.Patinatools.org/