A friend stopped over with his never been sharpened, but has been used, Lie Nielsen #5 plane. He purchased it new, not sure when, but less than a year.
So, the blade is A2 with Cryo treatment.
Blade came at 25 degrees and he wanted it at 30 degrees. No problem, used my Tormek to take it to 30 degrees.
The back of the blade has some machining marks so time to polish up the back.
I wanted to knock the burr off on something hard so I grabbed one of my Dan's Hard Black Arkansas stones (Dan's claims it as their finest stone). No more burr, but, that blade really wanted to stick to the stone even with the oil, strange.
Cleaned the blade and I dropped it onto a Shapton 5K Pro.
I should have taken a picture, sorry, but, it was leaving dark black on the stone.
I saw this with the Shapton 2K glass stone, 5K Pro, 8K Pro, and 16K glass stone.
Clearly, it was pulling stuff off the blade, but what it pulled, it left very heavy on the stone, and that stuff then prevented the stone from doing its job.
I found that a Nagura Japanese Natural Slurry Stone on the 5K helped some.
So, initially, it was wet the stone, run a few passes on the stone, wipe it dry, water it, ....
What we finally did was I would polish the back while my friend would continuously spray the stone. That was the best solution, but it was crazy.
I normally polish it more than I did, but, we ended up with a nice mirror next to the edge and an OK mirror going back an inch or two.
Next, I free handed the bevel and I have to say, it really wanted to skip on my. Very careful control to sharpen this blade.
I don't ever remember having this much trouble and I have flattened many blades. OK, not compared to people like Steve, but at least 100 blades (chisel and plane). During the process, my friend asked if he should return the blade. I recommended that he wait to see how it cut after we slogged through things.
We had to move the frog back a bit, but afterwards, that plane was amazing with that blade. We were pulling full length and width shavings so thin that I was measuring them as zero so probably under 0.001
I own Lie Nielsen planes, but I did up the blades years ago. Perhaps they were this troublesome and I just do not remember.
Does this sound normal? The final results were excellent, I just don't remember this much trouble. Maybe I am just pickier now so I do more....