Thread: Shapton Pros+Glass

Some folks have been doing this in woodworking. When I used to use shaptons for that, I glued mine to kingwood, but I had kingwood that I found in a bargain bin. It'd have been smarter to save it and use something else, but it made a superb base in a situation where you sometimes get stiction and the mythical flying shapton if you only use the plastic case.

So, go for it. it'll add weight, you can stick little rubber feet to it if you'd like, or a non skid surface of some sort (sandpaper or drawer liner). It won't affect anything but your ability to soak the stone evenly, and I don't think most people soak shaptons (they do work a lot softer/less sticky if you soak them for 15 minutes, and that's an OK thing to do - it's apparently in the japanese instructions to do it).

Side comment - when you put a pro on glass, you actually get a glasstone that provides you with a reasonable price vs. the amount of media that you get. Sure don't get it with the glasstones.

Originally Posted by DaveW

Some folks have been doing this in woodworking. When I used to use shaptons for that, I glued mine to kingwood, but I had kingwood that I found in a bargain bin. It'd have been smarter to save it and use something else, but it made a superb base in a situation where you sometimes get stiction and the mythical flying shapton if you only use the plastic case.

So, go for it. it'll add weight, you can stick little rubber feet to it if you'd like, or a non skid surface of some sort (sandpaper or drawer liner). It won't affect anything but your ability to soak the stone evenly, and I don't think most people soak shaptons (they do work a lot softer/less sticky if you soak them for 15 minutes, and that's an OK thing to do - it's apparently in the japanese instructions to do it).

Side comment - when you put a pro on glass, you actually get a glasstone that provides you with a reasonable price vs. the amount of media that you get. Sure don't get it with the glasstones.

Kind of my thinking

It's really just a modern variation of the wooden stands of yore for jnats, and serves the same purpose.

So far, the best bet for glues seem to be UV curing cements used in optical assemblies. Those have to have good dimensional stability during cure and are repositionable until exposure to UV. I'd like to know what Shapton uses, but that's probably a trade secret. If their glue was widely known, someone like me could do it!

Cheers, Steve

I think a lot of the woodworking folks have been using a marine epoxy because it's fairly stable once cured and we all (woodworkers) generally have some kind of epoxy handy. If you need to scuff the glass to get a good bed, wet and dry sandpaper is a good choice - it's sharp even as it dulls (horrible way to say that, it's friable and maintains smaller and smaller sharp points).

I have had stones separate when soaking (notably, bester 1200), but that was after several years of use and it was as easy as just gluing again.

The one strike against epoxy is that it seems to be like grease - the object and the substrate need to be constrained in at least two dimensions so that you don't find a stone halfway off of a substrate the next day, and glued fast that way.