Messages

Herman,

Put the cap on and squish it around a little. It will mix back together.

As for shelf life....think Twinkies. Short of nuclear holocaust (or leaving the cap off), it should be fine.

Well, it appears the ground has been well covered, but I wanted to add that I have seen many more wheels damaged by too much oil than I have frustrated owners who needed to use more oil.

The entire point of using oil at all is to conserve honing compound. If you partially fill the leather with oil, you don't have to fill it with compound to get compound on the surface.

I'm not convinced that handbook has it right. I've rarely had an application of compound last for more than 2 or 3 tools. I find I go through less compound if I put a little bit (one very thin stripe all the way around) every couple of tools rather than putting a lot on and expecting it to last.

220 is too fine. Use 80 or 100. I'm not too keen on Herman's mineral spirits idea. I just dust off the residue with a dry paper towel. I don't want solvents of any kind around my drive wheel.

Depends on what you're showing off and how you do it. Steering control says more to me about how an edge works than just about anything else. I used to cut 3/4" circles out of paper with a 13" chef's knife. That kind of steering type of cut is going to be easier with a bevel on both sides of the blade. Japanese single bevel knives excel at taking incredibly thin slices off things, but balk a little if you try to steer the cut.

You need a knife that has good steel, a bevel designed to your style, and a thiiinnnn blade. You can put that paper cutting edge on a  heavy knife, but it's technically more difficult and not very practical.

I will admit I haven't read the whole thread, but at a quick glance it looks like there's some confusion between the older version of the BGM-100 (height adjusted by building a block) and the new version of the BGM-100 (adjustable block included).

If you received an older unit, the directions for assembly are included, and shouldn't be confused with the newer version, which is what you would find online.

Mike,

I love your car mat idea. I've advocated cafeteria trays for a long time, but they don't cover the area that your mat does, and they can be hard for an honest person to come by!

One thing that occurred to me today while honing my chisel was that the stropping wheel is considerably smaller in diameter than the grinding wheel (when new), and I wonder what, if any, effect that would have on stropping, at least in theory.

In theory, if you use a jig, set it at exactly the same angle, and use no down pressure, the honing wheel will polish the middle of the bevel, missing the edge and the heel of the bevel. In practice, the leather has enough give to cover the entire bevel with just a bit of down pressure.

Isn't this what I've been saying for something like 20 years or so? 

You might swap out the knob on the SVD-110 for a set screw. Then it couldn't accidentally be adjusted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that microscopically, it does work.

As I understand it, two things are happening as an edge dulls...folding and crumbling...both of which are happening on a very minute level. Hitting the strop before the edge deteriorates too far is going to straighten out the folds, and if the crumbles haven't reached the size of the abrasive yet, it should deal with them just as well.

Carvers practice this approach better than any other group I've worked with.

It was at one time, unless you were Swedish. 

schtick?

Yiddish for a show business routine used to draw attention and/or laughs.

There were dull chisels everywhere. I never dreamed they would let me do my hatchet schtick on the show, but they ate it up.

April 2000

Robin,

Your method ignores what I feel is the most important step in producing a really keen edge.

The work you do on the bevel is going to raise a burr on the back of the chisel. You have to remove that burr from the back side. If you try to take it off from the front, you will undoubtedly round over your edge.

What you've described is perfect, except that you aren't removing the burr after working on the bevel. Given what you've said about how your back is to begin with, I am going to say you're about 30-45 seconds away from what I would consider really sharp. Just hit the back side on the leather as I described a couple posts ago, and Bob's your uncle.

What is sharp?

It will catch your fingernail and not slide.

It will cut any thickness of paper in a controlled way (I used to cut circles out of magazine stock).

Perhaps most relevant: It will cut across end-grain in softwoods without tearing.

Back in the days when prepress work for publications was done with waxed type and artboards, XActo had advertisements in the trade press that suggested you cut along a dotted line in their ad. If you didn't cut at least 3 pages below, you needed a new blade in your XActo. I'm not sure how that's relevant, but anytime the discussion about "how sharp is sharp" comes up, I recall those ads from about 35 years ago.