Thread: Is this for sharpening

The guy selling this said it was a sharpening stone. I quickly reminded him this was metal and not stone at all. Not sure what it is for but I searched the company and they made machinist type stuff.

There are several machinists here so you will have a definite answer soon enough.

Maybe it could be used for polishing? Take an old Razor and give it a try, only experiments show what can work :-)
On german Ebay i saw similar Stones / Metal Plates for Fountain Pens and drawing stuff.

Probably used for lapping with loose grit. There was a thread about something similar not too long ago

Based on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft-P...turing_Company) I assume it's not for sharpening. But who knows...

Similar metal precision plates were used with gauge block and it may have a thickness number on it or a threaded hole to take a stalk with a gauge attached to it.
Or it may have been used as a lap to resurface other instrument bases.
Old machinist
~Richard

Perhaps a reference surface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_blue ) for applying “Enginers Blue” when generating a flat surface.

Very interesting

Yeah that's probably an old cast iron surface plate or toolmaker's lap. Taft-Peirce is a pretty well-known machine tool maker. They made all sorts of precision bench tooling and even surface grinders. I have a compound sine plate made by them, I like their tooling.