Sharpen the Miki hisa folding knife using the King man-made/natural waterstone

Inertia has set in big-time. I've been working on my blacksmithing (Tong forging mania!! Interesting, no?), the to-do list just gets longer, and some of my projects have been on the back burner so long that I've no idea where to begin (again!). In addition to all that, the shop is getting so packed full of stuff that it's getting hard to find room to move, yet alone get some work done. EBay, here I come! I need to work on my meager photography skills. Certainly no lack of things to do, but where to start?

I know! Let's sharpen something!



A while back, I bought a peculiar looking waterstone. You can't have too many natural waterstones (or kanna, or chisels, or odd bits of wood/rusty metal/screw's/nails/files....), right?

Odd looking, to be sure. I thought that it *might* be a Japanese natural waterstone....

.....but it's not :'( 

What I thought was a manufacturer's INK stamp (first photo), is actually an IMPRINTED stamp. Bummer!

It's a weird stone, though. The fractures are probably due to freezing, but might just be from sitting too long in the water tank. It has the feel of a stone that doesn't want to be permanently wet. The fractures *look* like something that you see associated with old aotos, showing vertical cleavage planes and a somewhat coarse structure. It doesn't have the uniform grain of most man-made waterstones. Now that it's all cleaned off, it's composition is obviously very homogeneous. Definitely man-made.


Prior to bidding, I did a fairly thorough search for artificial waterstones with similar color, size, and markings, but didn't find any matches, so I was somewhat optimistic that it would be a natural stone. Oh well. Since I already have more synthetic stones than I can use, I set the stone aside for a while. A few days ago, this popped up on one of the Japanese sharpening stone blogs that I follow.....

We have a match! The gist seems to be that it's an old, unusual, King brand waterstone that is made from reconstituted natural materials. I guess that I was partially right, haha! In any event, my interest was renewed. And, yes, I actual read blogs about sharpening.......


The stone is 210-68-40 mm and feels rather light in weight, with an odd grainy, soft feel to it. It puts me in mind of a big chunk of powdery chalk, and feels too soft to be very practical as a tool sharpening stone. You can see how dished it is. It's obviously been used for sharpening knives, so.......



For ages now, my pocket knife has been one of those plastic, breakable blade disposables.

Even a $-Store craft knife can be improved by a little sharpening. A couple of swipes on a fine diamond stone will work wonders! The problem now becomes that the plastic body of the knife wears out faster than the blades do. And..... Plastic.

I sharpen disposable blades. My name is Jason and I have a sharpening addiction.......


I  got this a few weeks ago.

A Miki-hisa folding pocket knife, nothing special, but decidedly nicer than what I have been carrying. Mass produced, but with a laminated blade and a Bubinga body, after a bit of massaging it seems OK. I relieved the sharp metal edges and reshaped the body some, until it felt better in the hand, and while I wouldn't pay full retail for one ($40'ish), I thought it worth the $12 I paid.

Amazingly enough, I have had this for 3 weeks and it STILL has the factory edge! It's time to try out the new "mystery" King waterstone!


But first, some ground work. I use the Po'boy #125 diamond lap (loose diamond grit on a maple wooden block) that I wrote about before.

T=20 seconds. A minute on this is sufficient to remove most of the coarse factory grind.

Before I get too carried away, I need to work the hollow ground back of the blade. I start on a #400 Eze-lap. On the right edge of the stone, you can see a strip of black electrical tape. This is to keep the upper (curved) back of the blade contact to a minimum, at least for the roughing stages.

This being a cheap knife, the blade has a pronounced curve or hook towards the steel side,  so not only is the back of the blade hollow ground, it's also bowed along its length. This makes it pretty well impossible to make the back truly flat without making the urasuki all misshapen and ugly. 

I go for looks, cheat a little bit, and only do the minimum required to establish a small flat at the cutting edge of the blade (the lower, straight edge). The back is still slightly bowed, but it is adequate.

From the #400 grit diamond stone, I go to the oddball King man-made/natural. It is a very open bodied stone and needed to be soaked for about 5-10 minutes before using. It's very porous. 

And interesting....... Nowhere near as soft as I was expecting. I thought that this guy would  fall apart and be a heavy mud producer, but that wasn't the case, at least with this blade. It felt moderately fast, but without being aggressive. A soft, rough stone. Weird. You can feel the grainy nature, but it isn't scratchy at all.

An analogy: If carborundum/ silicon-carbide is a handful of finely ground glass, a typical aluminum-oxide stone would be a handful of fine beach sand. This stone would be a handful of dirt, or maybe sawdust.

The finish is in the #1000-2000 range, but the scratches are shallow, not sharp. This thing serves the same purpose as a coarse aoto. It would act as a bridge to transition from a sharp and scratchy synthetic stone to a natural finish stone. I strongly suspect that was the intention of the manufacturer. 

I would like to try this stone out using a hard kanna blade, but both the top and bottom surfaces are WAY too dished. This thing is shaped like an "S"!

Sticking with the "odd" theme, I use one of my favorite Oregon beach stones next. This was a bit of a step back, grit-wise, but served to confirm the relative grit finish. I didn't want to wait for more synthetic stones to soak. Most of the natural waterstones are splash-and-go.

I consider this stone to be around #2000, but a touch scratchy and the density is uneven. I still like it though.

And another Oregon natural waterstone to finish.

Good enough for a pocket knife.

Get (un)bent!-Straightening a bent chisel

OK, a good chisel, but one with issues. How far dare I go? The chisel is bent to the front, just a bit, but enough to be bothersome. This could be SO nice otherwise......

The bend.

I warm the chisel with a heat gun, thinking to reduce the shock of bending, somewhat. I am using my big 'ol machinist's vise with 3 movable fulcrums. Two are made out of oak, the third is a brass rod.

 The oak pieces are hook shape and have a small magnet glued into the back, where it contacts the jaw of the vise. The magnet attachment allows you to slide things around, to apply force right where you need it.

I periodically check for flatness by grinding the back of the chisel, using a diamond grit bench stone. There was a fair amount of rust pitting to eliminate, but the hard steel is thick enough that I didn't have to worry TOO much about grinding through, into the soft iron.

Better

Not perfect, but at least something that I can live with.

The diamond stone that I am using isn't truly flat. For that I need to use a different technique.

Lapping the back, using valve grinding paste on a granite plate/tile.

The black stick looking thing is....a stick. I use it to apply more pressure, directly over the cutting edge. My right hand wraps around both the handle of the chisel AND the stick, supporting the weight, my left hand applies the  downward pressure. 

The paste is VERY thick, so I thin it a bit with some mineral oil. Keep the paper towels handy, this is really messy! Ahhhhh.....memories of sandpaper and oil, scary sharp (yuck!).

You can see the rough/grinder spot that I mentioned, the black area on the right. If I try to take the whole back down to that level, I'll lose the ura completely and the hard steel would be getting alarmingly thin. It might become an issue in 10 years or so, but for right now, this is fine.

The lamination line looks very nice. 

Unfortunately, the side of the blade had some significant corrosion issues. I had to grind down the worst of it, leaving the lamination line a touch asymmetrical. Aesthetics aside, this will be a very useful chisel.

The finished chisel. The boxwood handle has been trimmed to shape and French polished. 

I made a new sharpening stone the other day, using some demo waste from our neighbors rock wall. Probably my best local found stone yet. It is hard, a little sticky, and makes a small amount of slurry on its own, but likes a diamond nagura if you are in a hurry. It starts at about JIS#4000 and seems to work up to around #6000. 

There are still a few butt cracks (sorry..), but for the most part, the handle cleaned up nicely.

A slight asymmetry, damned rust!

For sharpening this chisel, I used a nagura, a pink Akapin "Nakayama" that I bought from eBay seller japanathome (could this be another 330 mate name, hmmm?). They are sold as "maruka" Nakayama (highest quality from a particular old supplier), but these don't look ANYTHING like maruka's from reputable sellers. 

That said, the stone does work nicely as a  (big) nagura and for the $25 I paid (delivered!), I like it well enough. I wouldn't pay $50, though....

Even with all of that grinding of the back, the ura is still nicely shaped, go figure. Nice chisel, good thing that it didn't break in two. 

Lucky me.

The search continues..... continues

So, where were we?

Sandstone from the Oregon coast, found in my front yard (hopefully not my wife's favorite landscape design element). Very easy to process, not too hard and very homogeneous particle composition. Density is also very even. Not overly thirsty, nothing like the other local sandstone that I use. It looks like it will be about #1000-#1500 grit? If I wasn't familiar with the OTHER sandstone, I would guess #150 and scratchy as hell, haha!

Pretty smooth, easy to use and a surprisingly fine finish. No scratchy bits!

A diamond nagura seems to speed things along. This stone is not very porous, surprised..

Much finer than I was expecting! 

A different angle. I am TRYING to get the light right, to show the scratch pattern. The pattern is still uneven, though, because I haven't actually flattened the bevel yet. A perfect example of why a flat bevel makes things MUCH easier in the long run. I can't imagine how a person would get consistently fine results with a less than flat plane/surface.

W/ODC nagura

This is turning out to be a very easy stone to use! Very forgiving, VERY even, reasonably fast (especially considering the fineness!)

A fresh look using a different, harder blade, polished very fine with my Ozuku asagi.

This is as fine as I can get with a natural stone. Ozuku asagi.

NOW we'll step back to see what sort of a scratch pattern this sandstone leaves.

I need to think of a name to reference this stone.... Anyways, this is the new sandstone again, using the ODC nagura. A bit slower with this harder blade, but not much. This is maybe #5000-#8000? The scratches still look very prominent.....

But it is actually very reflective. Steel is bright mirror, iron is moderately hazy, probably due to the ODC as much as anything.

So, there you have it. A very respectable rock! Not perfect, but you could easily call this your final finish, AND I found it about 20 feet from my front door! A bit of mud, but not muddy, just enough to give a slight cushion. Water  management is not an issue, so no soaking is necessary. No real tendency to dish either.

I love finding these things. The whole process is so unlikely, it still just amazes me. I just need to fill the empty hole in the rock border with one of my "failure" stones before my wife notices.....

The search continues.... native natural sharpening stones

A picture can reveal so much...

If you look to the top of this picture, you will see the bottom/sole of one of my kanna... the lighter patches are rub marks from planing. There should be just 3 bars, not multiple patches. Time for a tune up! I did the other 2 kanna a couple of days ago, but obviously forgot this guy. Add to list...

I am building a new pond for the waterstones. A heavy plastic bin with a teak platform. And, yes, I do use that many planes. I am ACTUALLY in the middle of making some windowsills and that is why there are all of these tools laying about and to have as MANY ongoing projects as possible seems to be my ideal.

Speaking of too many projects...The cold snap has broken and it's time to look for new rocks..... Sharpening stones, that is.

I tripped on this guy on the way to the compost bin. I noticed the lines of relatively perfect cleavage and thought.... Well, you know what I thought.

A couple of taps with the chisel and... Almost perfect! The is some interesting silica solute (I think) that had seeped into the fracture eons ago. Interesting....

As a fall back, I also grabbed this from the yard. We have any number of round stones in the yard, but this one had that..... rough, sandy, gritty feel to it. Abrasive! Most of the other round yard rocks are more smooth to the touch.

They don't always split as nicely as you might like...

One hour later.

I grabbed a few kanna blade from my "magic box" to test out these new prospects. All seem to be good quality with nice ren-tetsu wrought iron. FYI, I have NO idea what type of steel is used on these blades, so any results are, well.....

Wet

This stone reminds me of one of those really hard aoto that I have been been wanting. Could this be my lucky day? It was easy to work with the diamond wheel, but the hand grinding portion was tedious. 

The feel is a bit rubbery, like the blade is dragging slightly. Not scratchy at all, though. Also not much grinding OR polishing.

I raised a slight diamond slurry

The slurry color is basically unchanged after 15 seconds and the appearance of the bevel reflects that. This isn't working.

ODC nagura

Well, that settles it. Still no love. The ODC nagura will not magically transform EVERY rock into a super sharpening stone (SSS). I was looking forward to writing a post about how I can transform a brick into the world's greatest hone, using only the ODC, but......

Maybe the other rock will perform better..... Cont....