Beginner Sharpening Problems

[RodC]

Thanks, Ken.  I was not using the honing wheel.  That is because I was expecting the fine stone sharpening to remove most/all of the scratch marks like I experience when using a 1000 grit waterstone.  When using waterstones, I proceed to leather strop honing only after the scratches are removed.  I usually polish the full bevel with the 1000 grit waterstone, then do a secondary bevel with a 5000 grit stone.

Since the scratches were not being removed, I thought the honing would be pointless at that stage.  After several minutes of Tormek fine sharpening, there would be some patches on the chisel face that would have a dull mirror look like I am used to with a 1000 grit waterstone.  But not most of the face.   

So I then took the Tormek-sharpened chisel to my 5000 grit waterstone and put on a short secondary bevel by hand - about 10 strokes on each side.  This produced a mirror finish at the edge. Then I used my leather strop with honing paste, about 20 strokes on each side.  Since the Tormek produces a hollow bevel, it is not too hard to hold the chisel so that just the front and the back of the hollow face rest on the waterstone.  Then you carefully pull the chisel across the stone.  The result is a nice, narrow polished edge.   

This gives a pretty good edge and carves well.  I then keep it sharp with periodic stropping.

So what you are telling me is that the results of 1000 grit Tormek sharpening should look a lot rougher than what I was expecting.  And I guess that the Tormek honing does a lot more to remove scratches than what I experience with hand stropping.  I will give this a try.       

[tgbto]

I would also point out that using the edge of the fine side of the grading stone might not be such a good idea. You dont want to remove material and be aggressive at that point, you want to crush the outside layer of the wheel into a finer grit.

So the more homogeneous you are (therefore using just the flat side) the better. But that's a personal feeling, I haven't experimented with the edge yet. I'm just happy with the results I have when using the fine side.

Also on a quick note, I tend to use two (one coarse, one fine) diamond plates as mentioned in antoher transformational video by Wootz. Together with the SE-77 they do a very nice job of grading the stone fine.

Oh and a last thing: the fine grading doesn't hold for long, i'd say to the order of a few minutes at a time. So if you keep on grinding for a long time after grading the stone fine it will revert to an in-between, much coarser grit, and therefore cause more scratches.

[RichColvin]

... 
Oh and a last thing: the fine grading doesn't hold for long, i'd say to the order of a few minutes at a time. So if you keep on grinding for a long time after grading the stone fine it will revert to an in-between, much coarser grit, and therefore cause more scratches.

Why is that?

[tgbto]

...
Oh and a last thing: the fine grading doesn't hold for long, i'd say to the order of a few minutes at a time. So if you keep on grinding for a long time after grading the stone fine it will revert to an in-between, much coarser grit, and therefore cause more scratches.

Why is that?

It has been mentioned in many posts. You can also see the same video mentioned above around 10:30, where Wolfgang says the stone has a basic grit of 220 but will settle around 600 when you don't use the grader. So that's kind of the "equilibrium grit", of the stone. Those are not exact grits of course, just an order of magnitude.