Thread: Building home made balsa hones

Hi Gents,


I've aquired a piece of balsa material 1/2x3x36" and am looking for advice from anyone more experienced than myself so I can learn from your experiences and perspectives. When I cut it into lengths it seems logical to mount it to a harder substrate to prevent any future deviations from a flat, true profile and then I believe the honing surface should be lapped. I have various sandpapers and a piece of truing glass for the lapping process and will pencil out a grid the same as I would do for my water stones on my DMT 325.

Not really sure what size I'd like. I could leave them 3" wide or cut it in half and have 1 1/2" lengths. I wouldn't go any smaller than 6" in length and 9" would be max as it divides evenly into 36 but the combinations seem endless

Is 600 grit high enough to finish lapping the honing surface of the balsa?


Thanks,

A

You'll find most favorable what you like to use. Do you prefer smaller hones and x strokes or wide hones? beauty of that stuff is you can make it any size you want. make a 1"x40" if you really wanted to.

Alright well although cutting it in half and having one 1-1/2" X 72" hone was awfully tempting Rick, I ended up bucking it into 4-9" lengths and have 11" backers with little 1" feet. The backer I used is some fancy wood that was kickin' around but has this awful paint on it. Hopefully that junk sands off okay as I think the wood will look quite pleasant unfinished. Going to get to fastening this all together today I hope and will see if 600 grit is high enough to lap the honing surface once the dust settles. I'll get some balsa hone pr0n pics up when I'm done. Out of 4 hones, one is going to be #1/4 Amplex diamond paste (0-0.5 micron range) and one is going to be 0.1 micron Cubic Boron Nitride spray and is going to be my coveted 160,000 grit hone. I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the other two. Maybe I'll just have to wait until some finer abrasives come out to load 'em up with!

Cut it into 4 pieces 9 in. long and glue each piece to a ceramic floor tile 3 in. wide. You now have 4 balsa hones. Put whatever pastes that suits you on them. Strop away...........

Jerry

Getting closer. Here is two of them. I need to pick up some glue though on the weekend to stick the honing surface to the stands. The wood is Philippine mahogany.

My 2 new babies The stropping surface was flattened on 240 and polished on 600 which worked out perfectly. 30k on left and 160k on right.