Originally Posted by
Metod Alif
Chris,
Thanks for a good/practical explanation. I am so used to chromium oxide that I do not think of it as an overkill. It represents an obvious improvement over #8000 water stone. Following David Barnett's 'education', I invested few bucks into diamond powder (currently with cast iron or scrap Corian). I am very pleased with his sharpening schedule.
Best wishes,
Metod
Yeah, I don't disagree about the CrOx not being total overkill, it's more that I think its the practical limit. Though I don't think its always a necessary either. The "necessity" of something like CrOx has a lot to do with what your finest stone is and what you are doing. My finest stone like yours is an 8k so CrOx is an obvious improvement (and also a great way to touchup tools) for me as well, but I simply don't always bother with that improvement...depends on the task and the tool. If your finishing stone is something finer than 8k the returns you get from CrOx likely diminish.
Anyway, looking back at my earlier post I overemphasized my point about CrOx being potentially overkill. It definitely has a lot of potential to be useful in the shop, but I always try to distinguish between something that is "needed" and something that is nice to have. I really only use mine on paring chisels and my finish smoother. Everything else stops at 8k unless I'm just playing around. If I was working with a stone that was closer to 1 micron, I likely wouldn't bother with CrOx at all (or very very rarely). That's just me though, as I really try to keep honing to a 2 step process. The extent to which any individual woodworker will find something at a .5 micron level useful is probably just that, very individual..it depends on the tools, the wood, the type of work - though its so darn cheap there is no reason for someone not to try it if they want to see for themselves whether or not the extra step is worth it.
In all honesty, I go back in forth with all this stuff. I go through phases where I feel like anything less than the sharpest possible edge isn't enough, and other phases where I think a good 5k-6k stone (like a sigma 6k or shapton 5k) is plenty good enough for most of what I do. I can be pretty wishy washy about it depending on what I'm working on and to some extent just what I randomly happen to think matters doing at the moment.
Last edited by Chris Griggs; 05-22-2013 at 10:35 AM.
Woodworking is terrific for keeping in shape, but it's also a deadly serious killing system...