Thread: leather bench hones

I am trying to make my own leather bench hones. i am glueing semi grain smooth leather to red oak that i have sand smooth and level. i have a water proof white glue it get hard and does not give any and i was trying to find out if i should have the smooth side of the leather up or the back side and just sand it a little more smoothly then the full sude that it has now. i tried to post some pictures of it here there should be 3 of them. i could not get them to show up but they are in this zip file.

also i was looking for some boron carbide if any one knows where to get that and that is 11k-10k right

I voted for smooth side up, but it really depends what you want to do:

-for refreshing an edge, aka prolonged hone avoidance, smooth side is better.

-for refining an edge, aka smoothing out an already sharp edge, some guys like the "suede" side. Heck, some folks even use hard felt with paste on it for this.


IMHO, I like the smooth side for everything... dragging my edge across the fuzzy stuff unnerves me.

You can use the leather either way but it looks like you're using Chrome tanned leather and I would humbly suggest you use Vegetable tanned leather instead.

I use Barges cement to glue my leather to the hones, I use the leather smooth side up but find it too bumpy and uneven so I flatten it on a large disk sander after it has set for a while. Barges is a contact cement used by leather workers/shoe makers. Disk sanding gives me a micro suede surface that is perfectly flat, durable and holds Chromium oxide powder or other abrasives very well but does not require the large amount needed when pasting the flesh side of the leather.

As for the boron abrasive, sorry... I only knew Hand American as a source and as far as I know, they no longer sell it.

Hope this helps

Christian

i am almost tollaly sure that this is vegetable tanned leather and the smooth side up i tried it on a few peices before this batch i had that same bumpy thing i did sand it down a lot it realy takes the sanding but when i got it to look good and pasted the hone to had very high drag and was hard to strop on i was afaird i would be useing too much presure so i posted this to try to see what would be the best. i found places to buy leather bench hones made for you like for woodcraft and they all looked like they were back up and i did got to a store and they are back up on all the ones they had. and how can you tell if it is chrome and vegetable tanned leather i have some other leather types and finished grades

here is some pictures of some different leather types and colors i have also some have a lot of grain in the smooth side. there are about 3 grades 1 very smooth like the red color semi smooth like in my first pictures and full open grain is what they called it like the white there is also semi and full in greys and blacks all the others i don;t know if they are chrome or vegetable tanned.

What kind of leather is that? It looks like chrome tanned. You might want to try oak tanned or vegetable tanned. I also like to put the leather hones on corian or some other hard and stiff plastic as the wood isn't dimensionally stable. I have a bunch of belting from old New England mills if you want to play with some other stuff and also have some fire hose if you want to try that.