Some time ago a friend of mine asked me to repair his log splitting axe. He had lent it to his FIL, who thought that splitting logs can be done on cobbles :eek::rant:
Anyway since it is shaped like a giant quarterhollow, I decided to try and make it as sharp as possible. The steel is very hard (can't really file it) and I had to use my DMT to repair the bevels and take out the nicks. Here are a couple of things I observed
1) I honed back and forth like if I had to set a bevel on a big wedge. I really put my shoulders into it and the DMT took this without a problem. after a LOT of grinding, it still lapped hones without a problem. There was no discernable loss of cutting strength.
2) Even though I celaned it afterwards, there was a lot of swarf loged between the diamonds. I couldn't really see it, but I noticed that my norton 4K became darker with lapping instead of lighter.
I solved this by taking a cheap synthetic hone, and scraping the DMT surface clean. I held it to the DMT like I would hold a paint scraper, and again put my shoulders into it. The surface became cleaner after awhile, and the surface is still sparkly. I removed a good deal of material from the cheap stone.
3) I tried honing that axe on the back of my norton flattening stone. Problem is that the norton 220 material is so soft as to be nearly useless. It dished out so fast that imo a norton 220 is as much use to honing as a sponge. when I gave up on it, it had dished out more than 1/8 in the middle, and I thought lapping it on my DMT would make it flat again. BIG MISTAKE. Because the stone was so dished out, it scraped against the short ends of my DMT. A DMT does not have diamonds on the side, so the stone started eating into the honing surface of the DMT from the side.
The corners of my DMT now have small bald patches where the nickel and the diamonds are gone.
lesson learned: do NOT lap severly dished out stones on a DMT. flatten them on coarse sandpaper or concrete first, and then finish on the DMT.
I thought these items were worth sharing. Especially since (3) is a good way to destroy a lapping plate, you might want to avoid that.