Thread: Iwasaki tamahagane kamisori

Very nice work.

Can you talk a bit about your process, wheel/s and grit selection. What is the wheel made from and where are you purchasing your emery and glue?

What other grits/wheels did you use?

Nice razor, enjoy.

Hi Euclid440,

thanks for your interest. I use only vintage material that I get from old grinders. You can find some more information on previous threads here:
http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...ern-razor.html
or here: http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...-r-tman-n.html

If you have any more detailed questions don't hesitate to ask.

Peter

Peter, beautiful work on the Bartmann, I missed that post, but did see the other.

So, your wood wheels are they coated, with leather or is there no need? And what is the wood?

I have been thinking of making 2, 3, and 4 inch wheels in MDF and gluing different rouges and Silicon Carbide powders. I have made strops from the pasted edge of a 3/4 in. MDF board, clamped in a vice, that works very well for stropping knives, especially large knives.

Which glue are you using? I was going to use Flex-a-glue which may be a form of contact cement or Glue Tight a form of hide glue, for that.

Do you grind with wood wheels and polish on hard felt?

Thanks, Marty

Marty,

normally all of the wheels are covered with leather. I have spoken to some grinders that also use only wood wheels, it depends on what to do. But for razor polishing only leather covered wheels were used. It is necessary that the surface that contain the emery or another abrasive powder is very soft. Also the wood used has to be soft. Therefore traditionally cottonwood was used to produce the wheels. Sometimes for other applications also walnut. Both woods don't tend to shiver. I don't know if using MDF is a real good idea. It is hard and the different wood splints may split. A massive piece of pure soft wood may be the better alternative.
But maybe just try some different setups.

For the glue - traditionally bone glue was used. I also use it nowadays, but of coarse it takes a lot of time to glue the wheels. Bone glue must be heated to 60-70°C and you need to glue 3-6 layers of glue with emery, each layer need some time to dry, the bone glue must be watered for some hours before, ....
But in fact it is by far the best method. There is one other glue, especially produced for grinders and it s called red-glue. There are two different grades of that glue, one is called liquid and is used for general preparation of the wheels, the other one called elastic is used for glueing the emery to the wheels. So also some work to do. One of the main advantages of the bone glue is the fact that the glue becomes slightly liquid again during grinding/ polishing because of the friction heat. This releases fresh abrasive particles from the glue on one hand and on the other it prevents from a higher temperature raise. If you use a wrong, hard glue, you will create the opposite and the steel you grind or polish may be burned or overheated.

The more you go from grinding to "Pliesten" to finer polishing - the softer the wheels should be in general. You should not go too soft in earlier stages, because that may leed to rounded edges on parts where you need or want sharp outlines.