Truing stones tips

[ionut]

Hi Everybody,

The manual suggests for the truing not going slower than 90 seconds, but even though I never measured the time I was always on the limit where the diamond head starts vibrating and even though the wheel was true round the surface was never how I would like to have it. And this happens because of the diamond housing which in my opinion has a huge amount of play that helps with those ugly vibrations that in turn will make those ugly grooves appear and at the end of the truing we need to use the grading stone to smooth the surface of the stone. More than that when the diamond exits on the opposite side very often chips the side of the stone, sometime pretty ugly if the stone has a low spot there.
There is a simple way to eliminate those vibrations. follow the normal truing procedure but after you lock the TT50 on the universal support, take a long enough electrical tie put it through the diamond housing and wrap it all over the to part of the TT50 as it is mount it. You only need to tie it moderately, enough to back up the diamond housing to it's riding platform and to allow you to easily rotate the knobs. This will drastically reduce the vibrations or eliminate them so you can take the time to true the stone even for 10 min if you need a nice surface.
For 1000 or 4000(Tormek) stones the TT50 had destructive results because the stones are much softer and the first time I used it on the 4000 to do the first truing the opposite edge ended like a 5tpi handsaw. The surface of these stones get badly grooved even though I never user more than a 1/12 of a turn when adjusting the depth and I always started the first cut at 0. And by the time when I was cleaning the grooves with the grader the stones were out of square again.
For these finer stones you can use to cleanup a 6" by 2" DMT diamond (220 or 325 mesh) stone clamped in the square jig and apply very light pressure. In fact between sharpening when using finer stones I use this method to cleanup and flatten the grinding surface of the stone about 50 times until I will use the TT50 again to make sure the wheel is not out of round. More than that this cleaning procedure will keep the surface of the stone always parallel with the universal support.
It could be great if Tormek will make an optional silicon grading stone for dressing and cleaning that could be clamped in the square jig so the stone would not get out of square like when in use freehand.

Ionut