Sharpening Bleedingblue's plane iron

[Pondhockey]

Thanks to all of you!  This has been a great thread.  I've purchased the Woodcraft granite reference surface and the discussion will certainly influence my practice.  Nice.

[Tom King]

After wearing out enough sandpaper, on the surface plate for flattening, to probably have paid for these several times,  I finally ordered one of these Atoma 400 sheets to put on one side of it for flattening.  Remembering how fast the coarser stones wore out sandpaper, I decided to only use this on my finer stones-6k, and up.   I liked it so much that I ordered the same size in 140 for the coarser stones.  The coarser stones don't need flattening that often, probably because I rarely use them, but so far both sheets have lasted several years, with some number of hundreds of uses, and still cut like new.  

http://www.toolsfromjapan.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=335_462_544&products_id=1630    (that's about 4x8 in inches)

With those sheets on either side of a face of a 9x12 surface plate, it leaves room in the middle for the stone holder.  Stones sit in a "lid rack" behind that surface plate on the drainboard of my sharpening sink.  I epoxied rare earth magnets (epoxy coated) to the bottom of that surface plate, and more magnets under the drainboard that hold it in place without my having to do any drilling through the drainboard.

If you order those sheets from Stuart, he doesn't sell many of them, and might have to wait for his Sister to be coming his way from where he gets them, so it can take a while if you go for the cheaper shipping- talk to him about timing when you order, if that's important to you.  I think he just stocks the ones that fit the plates he sells, but has availability of the others.

[estesbubba]

On 7/11/2017 at 3:32 PM, bleedinblue said:

I picked up an extra-coarse DMT plate today.  It's a half measure from the lapping plate for sure, actually not even  a third measure since it was just $53.  A lot seem to have success flattening stones with this plate so I thought it worth a try. 

That's what I use and it works just fine.