How to flatten your whetstones with sandpaper

so hey a short video today um i had some stones to flatten and it just struck me i should do a video on how i flatten my stones uh this is a another one 400 grit i used it as a part of a thinning session and i wore it down unevenly as i was thinning the knife it's a 400 stones i started way too fine i should have started on a coarser grit but i didn't so i spent way too much time going at this stone here and this area so this area was really low and i have just flattened it but i wanted to show you how you could do it if you say haven't got the diamond plates or any other fancy gadgets to flatten your stones so what you will need is a flat reference surface you will need some wet and dry sandpaper you will need a pencil and some water so i will water the surface of the stump to keep it from sliding [Music] i will water the surface of the sandpaper see i used this a little bit earlier and what you want to do on the stone is that you want to make a checkered pattern across the entirety of the stone make sure you get the corners as well and what you want to do is put it on the sandpaper and you're going to start to move the stone back and forth therefore removing materials from the stone but you also want to pay attention to where you apply pressure so if i apply a lot of pressure here you will see this side of the stone wear down quicker than this side of the stone so the surface will be flat but you will have worn down this side more than this side so when you have small stones like this you don't want to see that this side gets really short and this side is really high so you just want to you know pay attention to that and the way i counter that is by turning the stone every now and then as i go so i will apply pressure here and i will you know flip the stone and apply pressure on the other side so what you're going to see is that when you sharpen knife if you do like i do i sometimes sometimes i often find myself spending too much time doing this and what i'm doing then is i'm spending too much time on the middle section of the stone and if i don't flip the stone or if i don't pay attention to use the edges stuff like that this area of the stone is going to wear down quicker than the rest of the stone that will form a concave a concave shape and that will impact how you sharpen and how well you can sharpen especially if you do single beveled knives or chisels where you really need to have a flat surface to work on as for regular kitchen knives people tend to disagree on how flat your stone needs to be but we are not going to delve into that uh discussion right now because i don't think we have time so what you're going to see now this stone is is quite flat as i've just been working on it but what you're gonna see when you do this it's gonna show you for effect here it's it's going to look like this you're going to see that this part of the checkered pattern and this part or however your stone is some parts will be removed before the other parts this means that this area in this area is higher and this is lower and you want to keep going until you remove everything so you're going to start going at it and put this down we're going to keep doing this how long you do it uh depends on how coarse the sandpaper is and of course how worn down the stone is when you're done you're going to flip the stone and you're going to see that okay all this is now removed and the stone is flat if you want to make sure if you've been doing it for a long time you just go get go at it again for a short while to see that everything is removed and your stone is now flat so yeah that's it that's how i've been flattening stones for a while now i gotta admit when i started making this video before i started making this video this stone was in really bad shape so i cheated a bit i started with the atomo diamond plate i don't know if you oh there you go this is a beauty for this kind of work it's a lot quicker than the sandpaper but it is quite expensive so if you don't have it or can't afford it sandpaper is a great way to go uh but that's it uh you also have these correctional correction stoves or they go by different names uh this is in one i think it's 80 grit let's just say you know no no i'm sorry it's not 91 it's uh wu stuff it's a german it's a virtual headstone i think all these are this is also wusthof correction stone this one is one thousand four thousand and this is suhero i don't know what kind of grits they are no grits uh yeah don't know what kind of grits they are but they come with the stones so hero tends to supply these with a lot of stones usually comes in the package what separates these from you know inaugurates kind of look at the same to begin with i actually thought they were the same but these are they at least they feel vitrified they are harder than the actual stone they are only meant to smooth out the surface so say i went with this 140 grit diamond plate on a 8 000 grit stone you will see these small streaks going down the stone it will impact the sharpening so what you would do is you know take one of these and you would go over that afterwards just to smooth it out a inaugural won't do that inaugural will wear out it will deposit you know abrasive material onto the stone so you can then have a different experience on that stone while sharpening but i guess that's for another video so i hope you got something out of this if not just let me know what i did wrong and i'll make another video uh once i have another stone that will need some fixing and uh until that time i hope i'll see you guys again so have a good day

Channel: Lofoten Knifeworks

Views: 5,348

Keywords: whetstones, whetstone, naniwa, shapton, king, sharpening, flattening

Id: l4xaHxw39xQ

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021