I am recently back from 2 weeks working in Japan on a carpentry project where we constructed a tea house alongside Japanese master carpenters. As you can imagine we leaned a lot and one thing that may be of interest here was the sharpening set up. So this is how waterstones are used in Japan, the sharpening bench/trough, fed by a stream to give constant flowing water to remove slurry.
A wide range of stones, natural and manmade, they tended to use man made up to 6000 or so and naturals for finishing.
As stones wore down they were cut up and stuck to bits of wood to be used for sharpening axes and adzes, sharpening is totally second nature all of them having spent many hundreds if not thousands of hours sharpening so they can chat or even answer the phone whilst sharpening.
A lot of pressure was applied which meant the stones cut fast, a plane blade was sharpened on 3 different stones in about 4 minutes. The stones were continualy dressed with a diamond plate and slooshed with water so open fresh abrasive meant they were always cutting at optimum.
This is a short video Nicola made showing the worksite and finishing a plane blade on a natural stone.http://vimeo.com/13975599
And these are some of my current stones. I had never been a fan of waterstones for the coarser grits but I only had king brand, these cut slowly despite being very soft and needing continual dressing. I now have shapton 1000 and 1500 which cut at twice the rate and stay flatter too. I tend to follow with 5000 shapton though the king 6000 is OK then I use 12000 natural and finish with 16000 shapton glass stone. I find the spyderco stones top right rather hard, they don't cut so fast and give little feedback the knife skating as if on glass.
Bigger pictures and more detailed discussion on my blog here http://greenwood-carving.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-japanese-use-waterstones-for.html
A wide range of stones, natural and manmade, they tended to use man made up to 6000 or so and naturals for finishing.
As stones wore down they were cut up and stuck to bits of wood to be used for sharpening axes and adzes, sharpening is totally second nature all of them having spent many hundreds if not thousands of hours sharpening so they can chat or even answer the phone whilst sharpening.
A lot of pressure was applied which meant the stones cut fast, a plane blade was sharpened on 3 different stones in about 4 minutes. The stones were continualy dressed with a diamond plate and slooshed with water so open fresh abrasive meant they were always cutting at optimum.
This is a short video Nicola made showing the worksite and finishing a plane blade on a natural stone.http://vimeo.com/13975599
And these are some of my current stones. I had never been a fan of waterstones for the coarser grits but I only had king brand, these cut slowly despite being very soft and needing continual dressing. I now have shapton 1000 and 1500 which cut at twice the rate and stay flatter too. I tend to follow with 5000 shapton though the king 6000 is OK then I use 12000 natural and finish with 16000 shapton glass stone. I find the spyderco stones top right rather hard, they don't cut so fast and give little feedback the knife skating as if on glass.
Bigger pictures and more detailed discussion on my blog here http://greenwood-carving.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-japanese-use-waterstones-for.html
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