Thread: Where do I find Lynn's honing pyramid?

Originally Posted by paul_lynch

Let me test my newbie thinking on this... I'll try a run of question answering, then you guys can just fire away at me :-).

1/3 means one stroke (there and back again) on the 4K side, followed by three strokes on the 8K. So 3/3 would be three return strokes on the 4K, then three on the 8K.

I would guess that the reason Lynn suggests going up the pyramid then down is that thee instructions miss out one very important point: always test the blade (thumb pad or hanging hair) after each set, and stop if you are good to go with it. Running up the pyramid works when you are rehoning an already sharp blade, and makes sure that you don't over hone.

For a junker blade, you might just as well start with a 10/10 or 20/10, then work back down the pyramid. Still test after each set, you might get lucky, but you'll probably need to work all the way down to the 1/x strokes.

How was that?

Exactly right!

But on a junker blade you'd wouldn't be launching straight into the pyramid, right?

I always thought you'd be setting the bevel with 1k or 4k, and that by the time you start going up the 4K/8K pyramid you're already past the junker stage...

Fair comment (and thanks, Randy!).

The junker version is just a one sided pyramid, and the various places where it is documented uses the pyramid terminology, so I'll just go with what the experts say. The advantage is that you are still testing at every step of the pyramid, so it's giving you/us a guideline on how far to go between each test.