Yeah, it might be making it worse. I'd ditch the loose SIC and just try paper.
What did you lap today?
- Thread starter Tomo
- Start date
Oh yeah, right, now I see. Guess I need to see if Supercheap Auto have restocked after my last raid.
The guy selling the strange CF material ships from that general area. So I assume he is collecting it from somewhere near there. Doesn't look like normal CF, but probably something similar from there. Curious how it turns out. Keep us informed.
Found a Greeny Thuri in the wild and gave her a quick Clean up today, super excited to bring this one back to life. Its a great razor hone!
For a decade or so, this rock has been used to keep sandpaper from blowing away and to block round stuff from rolling off my outside workbenches.
A random offcut from my 'bluestone' side patio/seat wall:
There is some blue in there.
Front, wet, back
I have obviously been infected with lapping fever by some of the wild-caught rocks on this thread. But working on my hard arks is WORK!
I simply slapped this piece of sediment on my belt sander, so only kinda flat. First judgement - medium coarse. I might use it on my yardwork machete, see what happens.
A random offcut from my 'bluestone' side patio/seat wall:
There is some blue in there.
Front, wet, back
I have obviously been infected with lapping fever by some of the wild-caught rocks on this thread. But working on my hard arks is WORK!
I simply slapped this piece of sediment on my belt sander, so only kinda flat. First judgement - medium coarse. I might use it on my yardwork machete, see what happens.
I think that's right. It seems like he's cutting and lapping them himself, since I got a few offcuts in the box. It feels a bit questionable, especially if it's coming from a protected area. But I guess there is novaculite all over that part of the country. Sg is 2.74 on both those ones above, which I believe is a bit high for an actual charnley. I got another one I haven't tackled yet which is 2.7 but I think that's due to the rather thick skin layer.
Yeah it doesn't mean he is getting it from the protected area I hope. I would guess it is a stone from around there, but farther from the source. Which the SG seems pretty close. 2.68-2.72 is what I have seen in general for CF. It maybe a slower harder stone. Wonder if it is as fine though. Hope it at least works for razors. Does it at least cut steel using slurry?
I tried the dark green one out today. Finished to 600 W/D. I am by no means experienced but after 200 laps on WD-40 and a test shave I would say it is definitely a razor finisher. Very sharp and comfortable.
Another interesting thing is that the colour changes depending on the surface finish. At 100 it is light blue. At 600 it is dark green. Maybe that is normal for these kind of stones.
A brutally hard jnat and a panama hone with the synthetic backing.
A really out idwal.
Yeah, this new guy is like the 330mate of the charnley forest
I didn't flatten so much as resurface and tidy up the utterly slovenly lap the woodworker who sold me the shapton pro 8k had on it.
Probably wears it to bits, then half does the job of flattening and push it out the door when the new one comes in. Id imagine that's how it goes. I love some really old pike India, it the only synth I use. I own 2 in different sizes and I'll never need another. Waterstones seem to be much more trouble than they're worth to me. I get these you get an actual mirror finish but some slate can too.
It wasn't even that used. Given the size of one out of the box and what you have to cut through to zero it and get the water to accept/delete the film from manufacturing he probably used .4mm. the surface was flat but it was all smeared with different surface finishes like all shapton like to do if you really don't watch what you're doing. In an apartment setting it's just a menace for me to have to deal with a thirsty oilstone like an india. No matter how neat you try to be you get it on things..
This piece of gneiss crazy paving, something like 80 x 140:
I wanted to break in my 100 grit diamond lap, and this seemed hard but not exceptionally hard and was lying around in my back yard and so seemed like a good candidate for the job. I mean, I say this, but really, I just wanted to do this so that when I was finished, I could say, "that's gneiss". I encourage you to stare at the picture and do the same.
It's sort of hard to see, but that is more or less dead flat. I say more or less because of all the crazy big shiny inclusions (gneiss innit), which you can't lap flat without hitting a bunch more. So I figured it's no good for razors, and maybe no good for knives either. However, while lapping it I found that it will cut a steel chisel on plain water.
However the wheels came off a bit when it came to finishing it up. I took it to the 400 Atoma next to get the deep scratches out, no problem. Then I tried 600 w/d to get the atoma scratches out. Unfortunately the stone is a bit harder than I realised and laughs in the face of w/d. So I simply ended up polishing the stone up to a high sheen, and now it won't cut anything at all.
It does, however, polish like billy-o, and got my kitchen knives fairly gleaming. I tried a botan on it for kicks and got a couple of knives incredibly sharp. The inclusions are fairly inert and not problematic at all for knives.
I think I might try de-burnishing it with some #400 sic and see how it is then. It's not as totally useless as I expected.
I wanted to break in my 100 grit diamond lap, and this seemed hard but not exceptionally hard and was lying around in my back yard and so seemed like a good candidate for the job. I mean, I say this, but really, I just wanted to do this so that when I was finished, I could say, "that's gneiss". I encourage you to stare at the picture and do the same.
It's sort of hard to see, but that is more or less dead flat. I say more or less because of all the crazy big shiny inclusions (gneiss innit), which you can't lap flat without hitting a bunch more. So I figured it's no good for razors, and maybe no good for knives either. However, while lapping it I found that it will cut a steel chisel on plain water.
However the wheels came off a bit when it came to finishing it up. I took it to the 400 Atoma next to get the deep scratches out, no problem. Then I tried 600 w/d to get the atoma scratches out. Unfortunately the stone is a bit harder than I realised and laughs in the face of w/d. So I simply ended up polishing the stone up to a high sheen, and now it won't cut anything at all.
It does, however, polish like billy-o, and got my kitchen knives fairly gleaming. I tried a botan on it for kicks and got a couple of knives incredibly sharp. The inclusions are fairly inert and not problematic at all for knives.
I think I might try de-burnishing it with some #400 sic and see how it is then. It's not as totally useless as I expected.
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Highly compressed silicate stones all act like that -- including translucent Arks and similar. The silica particles are nearly fused together, and when polished look like a mirror and don't stick up enough to remove steel.
Highly useful if you control the surface texture. Surface with loose 60 grit SiC and light pressure to give it a lot of texture and it will cut like crazy, burnish it down shiny and it won't do much more than polish steel a little.
Fun to play with though, reminds me to try out that piece of slate I lapped down which may or may not be a hone.
Highly useful if you control the surface texture. Surface with loose 60 grit SiC and light pressure to give it a lot of texture and it will cut like crazy, burnish it down shiny and it won't do much more than polish steel a little.
Fun to play with though, reminds me to try out that piece of slate I lapped down which may or may not be a hone.
I lapped a very dished, 8 inch green Escher. It was a bigger job than expected. Messy green slurry everywhere. I'm color blind and don't see green very well but the slurry was so green even I could see it. It looked like military olive green to me. Not my favorite color by far.
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