Thread: Simple Scratch Pattern Experiment

At the risk of sounding dumb, why don't you take a piece of polished metal such as the spine of a knife or straight and start with the highest grit and work down to the lowest grit. In this way the previous scratch pattern will not interfere...or so it seems in my mind.

Originally Posted by JMS

At the risk of sounding dumb, why don't you take a piece of polished metal such as the spine of a knife or straight and start with the highest grit and work down to the lowest grit. In this way the previous scratch pattern will not interfere...or so it seems in my mind.

Hmm....not a bad idea! I was trying to brainstorm ideas of how I could do a test, and I thought about having several items (such as metal washer as McWolf1969 mentioned), honing them to ensure that they're flat and finish on 8000 on all of them. So the scratches from the Norton 8000 will be my control for the experiment. Then each one can be used on a polishing stone to see how it affects the finish. One problem that I have is that I can only use a scanner to get decent pictures of the scratches (using the digital camera proved very ineffective) and it doesn't do a great job.

It was just something I was willing to play around with, but don't really feel like doing a full blown experiment. I feel lazy...Plus Tim Zowada already did a much better experiment! (Thanks for the link Jimmy).

I know how the scratches look under 30x on a bevel for the different stones, I just wanted to see if could get a picture of that somehow. I just use a little handheld microscope gadget-thingy, so I would need a proper microscope and a USB camera (or whatever you need to take digital pictures with the scope) which I don't feel like spending the money on.

Dave,

I think we were separated at birth!

As much as I liked Tim's experiment, it's unfair IMO, He says he took the same number of passes on each medium, which, as we all know is not the best way to compare the results of each medium.

The best way is to use one medium until it achieves the results you are looking for i.e. uniform scratches.

Here are some pics from "The Complete Guide to Sharpening" and "The Art of Japanese Sword Sharpening" that show the results of each of the mediums. I have more info on the books in my blog here.

In the Complete guide pics, they first polished the blades up to 8K (the most available at the time of publishing) and then "dumbed down" to show better the scratches of the stones. In the sword pics, I think it better shows the different levels of scratches. Pure XXX porn IMM

Just wondering if there might be something wrong with me when I say that this is really beautiful,
That hard arkansas....

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

Cool experiment. Here are photos that Tim Zowada did on bevels, edges and stone surfaces. They were in the Wiki help files but they seem to be disabled for some time now.

Actually, Tim kindly allowed us to put them into the Wiki itself: Edges produced by various hones - Straight Razor Place Wiki.

With regards to the help files: We are working on it. Only, the file names were optimised for another Wiki extension, and we're still looking for a way to make them appear neatly again. Sorry for that, but we needed to upgrade the Wiki software to enable the "Create a Book" feature.