Direction of Honing/Buffer Spin

[Gary Curtis]

Does a honer (or buffing wheel) spin in the opposite direction of a grinder?

I want to swap out hard felt wheels for the aluminum oxide ones on a spare grinding machine.

Gary Curtis

[Richard Keller]

Not usually. Most buffers are just grinders with different guards (or no guards) and different shafts (usually longer) to hold different wheels.

I put my entire grinder together backwards, and turned it around for honing. Switch the guards end for end, and everything else, then you have tool rests, and guards, and wheels that go the right way. Switch ends up on the back though, not very handy.

Richard.

[Derek Cohen]

I have a hard felt wheel on my bench grinder.

Unlike grinding a blade, where the wheel turns into the blade, a hard felt wheel must turn away from the bevel edge - unless you enjoy a bit of blood and gore!

There is no need to turn it all around. Just hone the bevel by holding it edge down and bevel towards the wheel - which means low down on the wheel for me. Begin by presenting the bevel to the wheel just behind the edge and then rotating the bevel very slightly until the edge touches (caresses!) the wheel. Any more than this and you will dub the edge.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Workbench%20and%20Workshop/Drill-lathe-grinder.jpg

Yeah, I know - mine do not have any guards.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Dan Forman]

I tried a felt wheel, but I get better results just mounting a strip of leather on a board and doing it manually. A wire wheel proves more useful on the other side of the grinder for me.

Dan

[Derek Cohen]

Dan

There is room for different methods. But I think I know what you mean.

For some months now I have been experimenting with different strops: Veritas green rouge on MDF and on leather, Autosol on MDF, a leather horse butt strop (one side rouge and the other smooth) from Tools for Working Wood, a motorised flat strop (chamois leather on the sanding disk of my belt sander combo), a motorised round strop (round leather disk on the drill press), and a hard felt wheel with Veritas rouge. There are probably a few I have left out!

I get a fantastic result from the plain horse butt strop. I got lousy results from the hard felt wheel - until one day it just "clicked", and now I get hair-popping results. A piece of MDF with scribbled green rouge is terrific. Hey, they all work, but they take a little work before they work.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Jim Becker]

Power honing and buffing tooling should always have the wheel/buff moving away from you, the opposite of grinding. That may require turning the machine around if it's not designed that way from the front...

[Andy Hutyera]

I have been using the hard felt wheel as recomended by Leonard Lee for a number of years. I find it works extremely well. He recommends reversing the rotation of the wheel so that you can hold the tool on top of the wheel and see what is going on. I first tried it that way, but I'm so used to having wheels rotate downward, it wasn't long before I inadvertantly tried to buff a tool as if the wheel were rotating downward. The result could have been disastrous. Fortunately the only injury was to the wheel itself in the form of a large gouge. I promptly reversed the wheel rotation and have been using it that way ever since. Your view isn't quite as good, but with very little practice it produces a razor sharp edge.