Had some fun today. I ordered the acrylic bases, diamond pastes, balsa wood, rubber cement and 3m lapping film.
How To Use a Pasted Balsa Strop
- Thread starter Slash McCoy
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Slash, are you still suggesting .5 then .25 then .1? I saw a reference to just two balsa plates, just the .5 then the .1, skipping the middle stage.
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- #443
Slash McCoy
I freehand dog rockets
Just starting out, I MOST HIGHLY RECOMMEND doing the full progression. You need to experience, with little chance of failure, an absolutely perfectly executed method edge early in the game. Skipping .25u makes for a 5:1 jump and might require a few hundred laps if you are using sufficiently light pressure to get best possible results. Add the middle grit in there and you can go about 50/50/50 or maybe more like 50/75/100 (the feedback is very poor with the balsa and you must rely on sharpness testing and plain old lap counting) and be pretty sure that your edge is all it can be. Then use just 50 laps on the .1u post shave, for maintenance. Once you are familiar with The Method, sure you can skip .25u just like a stone honer can go straight from 1k to 8k or whatever, when he knows how to read his progress. Just ask yourself this question: "How much do I want to achieve best possible results?" And there is your answer. The fewer wild cards and fewer omissions and substitutions and the less freestyling, the more certain your results will be satisfying. With a dozen good Method edges under your belt, you might want to try leaving out the .25u or some other stage. I listed all the detailed steps specifically so that a newbie could get in the game with very early and effective results, and because it just works.
Got it.
I got my pastes in prefilled syringes from Ted Pella.
No dilution. Only takes a small amount. It's been described as "1/2 of a pinto bean".
And sorry, I'm not sure if they ship overseas, but I suspect they do.
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You can buy jars of diamond paste from China on eBay. @Slash McCoy has used and found it to be fine.
- Thread starter
- #451
Slash McCoy
I freehand dog rockets
That's a well regarded source. I have used cheap Chinese stuff and it seems to work fine. However so little is used that lately I have come to think that maybe it is better to stick with the premium stuff like Ted Pella's. YMMV.
I checked out Ted Pella's web site to see what they had to offer. Besides the diamond sprays, I also noted they sell alumina suspensions, even down to 0.05m micron. Has anyone tried the alumina on pasted strops? If so, how were the results?
Alumina (also known as corundum - the basis of sapphires and rubies) is not as hard as diamond or even CBN, but it is harder than other minerals, so it should be a good honing/polishing compound.
Alumina (also known as corundum - the basis of sapphires and rubies) is not as hard as diamond or even CBN, but it is harder than other minerals, so it should be a good honing/polishing compound.
Still using .125u CBN post shave. Results are equal to .1u diamond for maintaining sharpness. As far as comfort goes I can't say. I am getting increasingly comfortable edges but that is just as likely because my honing/stropping is getting consistently better - who knows? I'm going to continue though as it isn't making anything worse.
Due to the differences in partical shape and hardness between CBN and diamond, I am not at all surprised that you consider 0.125 u CBN to be similar to the finer 0.1 u diamond. At that level, either should provide a keen, smooth edge as long as the earlier work on the stones and/or lapping film, and pasted strops was done well. Otherwise, you are putting "lipstick on a pig" as the old saying goes.
The reason I use .125u is because it was the closest to .1u I could find. There was no other reason. I’m quite certain the additional.025 makes no practical difference at all. In fact, from now on when I refer to it, I’m going to say .1u CBN.
The ted pella syringe of .1u diamond paste is huge, enough to last me many years.
Adonay, I don't dilute it. I just pull out the stopper, spread a bb's worth on my fingers and wipe that over the lapped balsa. Do that several times and the balse is pretty well covered, more or less. And all the little bb shapes used, add up to half a bean or less.
I used to think I had to cover the entire area, missing nothing. Nope. You over cover doing that. You end up with a dry slurry of diamond bits rolling around and ruining your edge. Better to have too little. Better to have some little areas missed on the balsa. No slurry, just a diamond particle mostly buried in soft balsa, just its head sticking out. You have a flattened balsa surface that has an aggressive surface with teeth only .1u wide.
it seems to be the missing link in between leather and 12k honing stones. it's a stropping system that takes just barely enough steel away so that the shoulders stay flat, not rounded. It's like leather on steroids, but unlike pasted leather or pasted linen, it's flat and accurate.
Adonay, I don't dilute it. I just pull out the stopper, spread a bb's worth on my fingers and wipe that over the lapped balsa. Do that several times and the balse is pretty well covered, more or less. And all the little bb shapes used, add up to half a bean or less.
I used to think I had to cover the entire area, missing nothing. Nope. You over cover doing that. You end up with a dry slurry of diamond bits rolling around and ruining your edge. Better to have too little. Better to have some little areas missed on the balsa. No slurry, just a diamond particle mostly buried in soft balsa, just its head sticking out. You have a flattened balsa surface that has an aggressive surface with teeth only .1u wide.
it seems to be the missing link in between leather and 12k honing stones. it's a stropping system that takes just barely enough steel away so that the shoulders stay flat, not rounded. It's like leather on steroids, but unlike pasted leather or pasted linen, it's flat and accurate.
So apparently garnet powder is used industrially. Anyone ever get a hold of any of this and embed it in balsa? Googled around for it inspired by coticules. I wonder what 3 microns translates into when you consider there are more faces on the crystals... Is it the distance between the points but the angle of the edges leading up to them?
Several years and material science degrees later "So Dr. Six, what inspired your deep interest in crystallography?" "Why shaving of course."
Garnet Powder On The Stutz Co.
Though I do get the impression that the Method does render all of this kind of moot as it'd be the 0.1 micron determining the final edge so even if you could find garnet nearly that small it'd probably not be distinguishable as @steveclarkus is finding with the CBN--sounds like once it gets to that scale the edge is so fine that it's pretty much irrelevant?
Instead, it seems like experimenting with other abrasives would mainly be fruitful if you were seeking to produce a comfortable less keen but still keen enough for shaving edge. From what I've read here so far it sounds like that compromise is only successfully accomplished with natural whetstones?
Several years and material science degrees later "So Dr. Six, what inspired your deep interest in crystallography?" "Why shaving of course."
Garnet Powder On The Stutz Co.
Though I do get the impression that the Method does render all of this kind of moot as it'd be the 0.1 micron determining the final edge so even if you could find garnet nearly that small it'd probably not be distinguishable as @steveclarkus is finding with the CBN--sounds like once it gets to that scale the edge is so fine that it's pretty much irrelevant?
Instead, it seems like experimenting with other abrasives would mainly be fruitful if you were seeking to produce a comfortable less keen but still keen enough for shaving edge. From what I've read here so far it sounds like that compromise is only successfully accomplished with natural whetstones?
The 3 microns would be how fine of an edge would be produced. The angles of the edges would impact how quickly it "cut".
- Thread starter
- #460
Slash McCoy
I freehand dog rockets
3 microns is roughly equivelant to 8k ANSI grit, I believe. Properly set into balsa it would be more like maybe 15k? More, or less, depending on embedding technique. So, could be useful but doesn't really match up with The Method's progression. Might make a good polish. Might add a certain something to a knife's edge. Try it and see, but do try it alongside a razor with a Method edge.
