Originally Posted by
JazzWillie
I'm not a pro at honing what so ever, but my brother-in-law is a metallurgist at Northern Illinois University and I've posed a few questions to him that pertain to honing and steel make up. One of our conversations had to do with something of this nature. He said basically if you are drawing an abrasive plane across a piece of metal that the bur will always form if two planes of surface form a point and the abrasion is being pulled away from the point (in a back hone stroke). What he said is happening is the material from the thicker side of the plane is sliding across the stone toward the thinner point and forcing it upward. When you give it a traditional honing stroke you force it back onto it self and actually make more work for yourself. What would happen is if you kept the blade on the same side or flipped it you would be leaving bigger pieces of metal on the stone that could damage the blade and the nature of cutting the bur off can serrate the edge ever so slightly. Kind of like when you bend a piece of sheet metal repeatedly and it snaps. It never breaks off smoothly, its always jagged. Then he said that if the stone were course enough that you might not even know it happened but on a high grit stone you might be scoring it, because the high grit stone particles are so much smaller than lower grit stones they wont take the bur off as quickly, and these score lines would result in raised areas in the blade which would cause further damage to the stone. One thing he said is this is all relative to the type and hardness of the metal.