Tag: sharpening

A Prince of a King Stone

I had (have?) a little problem with sharpening stones. It’s not a functional thing for woodworking, though I am probably better at sharpening than I would be without having this little “thing” with stones, and the microscope, and straight razor shaving, and sharpening scissors and axes, and ….anything. Even plastic things with an edge.

But from a lot of exposure, I can identify what’s run of the mill and what’s not. And what’s absurd in price (cough…shapton 30k, anything new from harrelson stanley – my opinion….and so on) for what you’re getting. Not that you can’t make something expensive to make even if the core parts of it are not, but remember you, you can go to 0.1 micron diamonds at low cost and a full pound of linde close graded white alumina at 0.3 microns was $60 the last time I splashed out. it’s so fine that it’s not very dense – it sits in a big tub something like 1/16th of the density of the actual alumina textbook amount itself.

Over time, I’ve kind of lost interest in waterstones because I think they aren’t as practical for most people. They seem practical early on with a guide, but they’re …well, not very convenient for a point and shoot type sharpener with skill. What do they do so well that an oilstone won’t do? Cut fast? They certainly don’t cut faster than a silicon carbide stone with the right oil to flush out particles, and they don’t cut a huge array of steels better than sprinkling loose diamond on a natural stone. Have you seen a waterstone that properly cuts CPM 10V? I haven’t. A slow but wonderful feeling very fine oilstone will cut 10V making it impossible to see under the microscope that it’s even loaded with vanadium carbides that are much too hard for aluminum oxide to cut properly.

Before I go on – there are waterstone I treasure. they all came out of the ground, and in some cases, people have traded something I’m fond of, sold me something maybe they sold because of my excitement, or given in exchange for advice or services. So, on the very slim chance you’re one of a very few people who has done that, I have those stones. They permanently reside here, and I guess when I’m dead, people can figure out what to do with them.

So Why is this about King?

The prince of a King I’m talking about is this stone:

Looks like a ratty old oxidized king waterstone, right? It’s tan.

The writing on the back gives this up as an oilstone. it’s vitrified as far as I can tell – like a Norton stone. It’s also really fine, but I think there’s a skin on it so I can’t tell how fine. It’s in no way, shape or form remotely similar to a Norton fine india and I’m pretty sure I have an old stone that is a norton ultra fine or someone else’s offering of the same. Norton has a stock number for a UF, and that’s the stone we’d all like to have, but I’ve never seen it for sale during the period of time I’ve been a woodworker.

I put some oil on this stone, and once I started using it, the oil went right in.

In fact, all of the Japanese oilstones I’ve gotten other than the ceramic mug type stones that are like a Spyderco white stone have not been oiled or pre-oiled. I’m going to take a shot at that with this one as soon as Vaseline arrives. I usually stand my ground, so I don’t keep Vaseline on hand.

Put differently, these are oilstones, but they seem to be sold allowing for use with water, and they work like shit with water – not the good kind of it, either, more like about as well as a cowpat functions as a frisbee. With oil, they are wonderful. They have a “softness” to the feel that is kind of like soft brick, but other than the white ones in a subsequent picture, they have some feel. I think if folks in japan were not so averse to using oil in stones, these would’ve gotten some footing as an interim stone where there just isn’t much good anything in waterstones -especially natural ones. And yes, I have had huge pure white whetstone size Mikawa nagura. they’re really neat, but they aren’t better than a lot of things that cost $25.

So, what does this do for leaving an edge? After I get some vaseline melted into this thing and then just oil for real, it’ll probably cut a little faster. As it sits, this is what the back of a chisel looks like:

It’s kind of hard to judge that this looks like, but the nature of the stone is it’s touch sensitive. The flat area is bright polish – brighter than 8k. The edge as I see it has no foil without buffing or stropping, just light teasing off of the burr, but it does also not look terribly fine. Just really fine, and it shave shair, but by the polish and the tiny burr, I expected more.

I wanted to get a close up look at 150x with the metallurgical scope, but it definitely is designed for reflective metal stuff, and things like stones absorb a lot of light and this picture looks decent, but i’m sure there is detail missing due to the scattering of the light.

There are no large particles in it, but how fine does the picture suggest it actually is? No clue. Surprised not to see more pore structure given the oil will disappear in it in a fraction of a minute. I have coconut and palm oil on hand, and the palm oil at least is probably pretty stable, but I don’t want to risk soaking the stones with that as it’d be stable for a couple of years, but will it go foul in the longer term? I’ll wait for the Vaseline, but I’m going to make a box for this thing. Vitrified alumina at this level of fineness is not common. Especially in a group of stones that was probably about $100 including shipping from japan. There were about 10 in that group.

Some from that group are here, and some are from prior stone groups. When I was in the throes of buying and sorting and redistributing vintage natural waterstones, I’d get some of these types of stones as a side show thing. As in, for the most part, I never really paid for them in a sense – I paid what I thought the other stones were worth, and the overall average for these probably is $5-$10 per.

The four gray and white stones here are much like a spyderco stone but larger. the top one and the one on the right both are the same – just the front does not say “barber oil stone” on it. they are alumina, very fine, but also are very slow. I see these all the time, but they often look little used and I’d guess for someone used to a waterstone, the operation of them would’ve been confusing. They are a tip of the tool stone.

The prince of a king is in the middle and trials of it made the face filthy. That’s just the way it goes. It’ll be dark once it’s soaked, and look less nice.

Top right is a middle india type stone, also 8x3x1 in size, or thereabouts, and it’s marked 300 vs. the white stones #3000. it is much finer than a norton fine india, so the number on it isn’t meaningful in grit terms that we’re used to. It was, perhaps, relelvant to the old grit scale where 1200FF or something like that was a barber hone abrasive.

In the years after those early 1900s barber hones were made, something changed industrially regarding how fine alumina is made. Precipitating may be the right term, and fine alumina could be had loose. Before that, something like a barber hone must have a glazed surface or it will chew up the edge of a razor in a hurry.

Some of the other red stones here are oilstones, or probably designed to be. Some with a dry vitrified feel and some have a hard but muddy type consistency if you can get something with diamonds on them to abrade them with an oil lubricant. They will go out of flat but not remotely close to as quickly as any Shapton stone, let alone king. The only work of significance I see done with any of these is little grooves from someone sharpening gravers, awls or who knows what – something narrow and hard. obviously, waterstones are not much fun for sharpening gravers or carving tools.

How do you Get These?

I’d never pay a lot for these. You don’t know what you’re going to get- it’s more like a box of cheap stuff and then you see if any is good. They are around in japan on Yahoo (equivalent to our ebay), but someone could want $80 for one, and the next person may sell a pile of them in a group of 20 stones for $60. Beyond just not having anything to return if you don’t like things, you can get a real nasty surprise after you win an auction when you find the proxy services seem to have suddenly lost interest in surface shipping really heavy boxes. A $60 lot of stones suddenly will have air shipping charges of $200. No thanks.

I’d personally put them into a category of if you happen to see one cheap on ebay, maybe. Otherwise, it’s just fun to me to see what was made in different eras, geographies or both.

The Myth of the Forged Iron

I’m still scraping planes lately, dragging my feet on my chisels, and making some plane irons where necessary for scraped planes. I guess not getting the chisels done is an attention deficit thing. When work is busy and there is deadline pressure, I tend to want to explore things because exploring and getting better quickly at something is engaging to my mind.

That said, I read things fairly often about steel. People talk about it a lot. Often it’s about preferences and then explanations. I feel like from experimenting, there are a lot of things that result in properties I like, but I don’t always know why they do. It’s more important that I can get a result than it is that I can explain it. Why? Because trying to explain the why instead of the what, or put differently, feeling an obligation to explain things when you know the what and have never tested that your “why” is true leads to a lot of false information.

There’s a discussion going on on SMC at this point that’s got several nuggets in it. One is attributing ability to plane certain woods to an alloy when the attribute making the difference is hardness. I’ve mentioned before that O1 and V11 both have similar toughness levels and both have a similar working hardness range. Toughness is an impact test – how much energy comes out when breaking things. In my experience, O1 has a third attribute that’s generally better – edge stability. Stability is a nuanced term used for knives that basically implies the ability to hold a fine edge. Not just any edge that will go through an abrasive laden machine sharpness testing card, but the kind of property that makes small chipping less likely in one steel vs. the next. At any rate, LV tempers their O1 soft, and XHP/V11 is tempered sometimes (at least in the irons and a single chisel that I had) at the upper range. Figure these are 59/60 respectively and 63. You probably would not recognize O1 as being the same steel if you used two irons, one at 60 hardness and the other at 63, and didn’t know what alloy they are.

That aside, all plane irons are forged

Clifton was the last maker of planes that I can remember advertising that irons were forged. I don’t know what they were doing, but I’m sure someone does. I suspect they were drawing steel to length mostly. I don’t see an advantage to doing this and there’s a non-zero chance that the results could be worse than using rolled material and an established process.

Things happen with steel when you’re forging. The grain direction is altered, but grain is also enlarged, and you have to grind, normalize and do whatever else needs to be done after that. But normalizing will be important because the distribution of carbides is not always ideal after forging. Maybe it never is, but at least sometimes it’s not. Why? Carbides can form at grain boundaries creating a layer rather than being neatly spherical or tubular sitting at grain boundaries, but not separating them.

I don’t know what happens industrially, but Clifton’s forged irons were well liked. I think the stamp was actually their biggest differentiator, but so was the price here. The last I saw them at highland, the price of an iron was about double that of any others.

Normalizing steel re-establishes grain. Annealing after normalizing or doing something else to adjust the structure before quenching changes more things – from the state (martensite, pearlite, etc) before subsequent steps, and you can refine grain smaller and adjust the shape of carbides (types of annealing can do that).

Rolling is Forging

If you buy rolled flat stock, the steel has already been elongated and widened by rolling. Rolling is a type of forging and if the steel is not spheroidized, it probably comes with carbides that are more tubular. It definitely has the benefit of continuous grain in steel, and grain is important in terms of edge orientation. Even though grain is established by normalizing, for reasons I don’t know, there is a bias for toughness based on rolling direction.

Nobody here has ever used a cast plane iron, or one that isn’t forged. Even PM products are rolled into bars. Forging at one point was important before modern rolling or die forming (rod) or drawing out because steel that’s as cast won’t have the same toughness or orientation. if you go back far enough to steel like wootz, it was necessary to get layers of toughness alternating with layers of carbides.

Brent Beach had an interesting page on edge life, but what it left behind was also comparative pictures of edges that provide other information. For example, the Clifton iron pictures are here:

https://brentbeach.ca/Sharpen/Cliftontest.html

The edge performed fine. If you want to see ugly results, you can go to the main page and look at the Shepherd irons. I had one of those from a plane kit and mine as equally horrible with surprise failures aplenty out of nowhere. Even looking back now, I have no clue how they made irons of such low quality unless they were really bargain hunting stock.

Back to the comparison – Steve Knight offered O1 irons that were cryogenically treated. I know that instantly brings some folks to suggest there’s no reason to do that because it’s for A2 or other highly alloyed steels. Larrin Thomas (Knife steel nerds) also addressed this well in discussion of various cold treatments. Cryogenic treatment mostly trades some toughness for additional hardness, and it’s true that it’s beneficial to A2 because the toughness is coming from retained austenite (something we don’t want too much of it) and liquid nitrogen converts that to martensite (something we want a lot of). If steel has enough toughness, we usually will like something that’s gotten cold treatment more than something that hasn’t.

Steve’s O1 iron pictures are here:

https://brentbeach.ca/Sharpen/Knighttest.html

Notice the fineness of the edge. The footage planed isn’t the same so it’s hard to make the call for sure that steve’s iron would also have planed longer than the Clifton iron – I’d bet on worse than even odds that it would’ve planed somewhat longer, though.

Steve said at the time “I don’t know what cryo does, but it makes it better” when anyone at the time insisted that it was only for A2. you may recall those days, when we generally didn’t talk about anything but “vintage steel, chrome vanadium, O1 and A2”. Ahh…the same days where folks insisted that chrome vanadium steel was gummy and cheap and less fine and full of stuff that’s not in “good old plain carbon steel”. What most of it was lacking was a good quality melt and roll and, especially, enough carbon to get into the low to mid 60s. It’s less alloyed than O1, though, not more.

Back to Steve’s irons – why were they better than Clifton’s in this test. Finer and probably long wearing? Because they are – the combination of the rolled material and then the process applied before heat treatment and then the cryo made for a better iron.

I had a couple of these irons, but no longer have any, or I’d give you an idea of their hardness. They were bonkers hard without being chippy. They were just good.

I have forged irons from rod (stanley replacement irons) and they are fine. I think the forging got more stuff in solution in my case and the result is the irons are a bit hard and hard tempered, but not faulty. Hard tempered meaning they are bitey and drop their wire edge quickly. Day to day, are they any better than the first good irons I made with starrett steel just by heating to nonmagnetic, a little further past that and then quenching and tempering? i don’t think so. They’re a little different, but I can’t say that perception of properties is more than a slight difference in hardness.

The quality of the stock and then the quality of the process applied after shaping is really what makes a difference. Just as terminal hardness and not alloying is almost always what makes a difference in perception about what can work in really hard woods and what can’t.