Cheap rough grinding stone for T3 solution

[aquataur]

(This subject probably affects only readers in Austria and Germany, but this is the place to post it anyway.)

Just recently I bought a T3 model and sharpened a few chisels to perfection.
Sobering, when I put my Stanley hand planer´s blade on the machine, which is obviously HSS.
After half an hour I gave up, when only half of the blade was done.

I looked in the web for rougher stones, but you only seem to get finer stones, at least for the T3.
A diamond wheel might be the solution, but this is another investment. But a cheap workaround is at hand.

I happened to have a wet/dry grinder machine that is ubiquitous in home-department shops in Austria and Germany similar to the one shown here:
http://www.walter-service.at/index.php?page=product&info=1669

I suspect this is a chinese machine which is sold by a couple of tool traders under different names.

It consists of two grinding stones, one high speed dry and one low speed wet grind both mounted at a 90 degree angle.  The machine comes at a price of about 50 Euros. Maybe the stone can be obtained as a spare on its own..

It turns out that they use the same dimension grind stone (200 mm * 40mm) as the T3 although with a different bore. However, their machine uses the same axle and they use an adaptor. The stone appears much rougher, I guess a 120 grit from the information on the website. The wet stone they sell as compatible article has 80 grit and a ridiculously low price.
I used their adaptor and lo and behold, the grindstone fits perfectly albeit with a small wobble which does not hurt.

It ground the planer blade into shape in one minute flat. A little touch-up with the SG stone in 1000 grit mode and that was it - razor sharp HSS planer blade with a perfect angle.

A different solution would be to use their bench grinder mounting set BGM-100 with some makeshift holder on the cheap machine, but the prior solution is more elegant and maintains the correct angle as long as the stones have the same diameter.

I consider this workaround not financially detrimental to the Tormek series of articles, because such a stone is simply not available. In the contrary, this should encourage you to get a T3 folks!

-helmut

[aquataur]

This is now obsolete. See here:
https://forum.tormek.com/index.php/topic,5220.0.html