Hey Mark.
I think the whole point of the nanocloth is that it brings nothing to the party on its own. If we have a substrate that does nothing, then the results that we get are entirely due to the abrasive that is applied. I have a set of paddles with nanocloth mounted on them. I use them with 0.05 and 0.025 CBN. They definitely remove metal. I can see the metal grey ultrafine particles left on the cloth when I use them. I don't use them any differently than any of the other strops that I have, but they definitely are abrading and removing metal, though at these grits it is a lot like sub-micron polishing rather than sharpening in the normal sense.

The concept of using them wet had not occured to me. I have always applied the sprays and let them dry completely before using them. I will have to give the wet strop idea a try.

Phil

I've found that getting the nano-cloth slightly damp really helps, otherwise, the diamonds or CBN flies off in a powder.

wickededge wrote:


I will definitely try. The problem with the nanocloth strops I have experienced is not that they don't work at all (they get slightly black-ish with metal filings), but that they work so little.



Agreed. That's why I wondered how they compare to the kangaroo strops, which bring nothing to the party on their own either. (That may not be entirely true; they will probably burnish somewhat, but not abrade.)

wickededge wrote:


Sorry, one of the noobs here joining in the discussion with noob qeustions...

Are you telling me that you took the 100 grit diamond stones and rubbed them together with the microfine ceramics (thereby abrading away ceramic material and roughening the surface) and then progressed up to the 1000 grit doing the same? This seems scary as $h1t to me! LOL I thought the benefit of the ceramics was their super smooth surface? Could you please elaborate on this process or even do a video of this?

Thanks!

Hey Tom,

It's pretty common to lap ceramic and waterstones to flatten them out and knock off the high points. I started with the 100# stones in order to efficiently flatten the ceramics and then progressed up through the grits to smooth the surface, ending with a 3 micron bench stone that yields a very smooth surface. I could take it a step further and use some sub-micron diamond spray on top of polished granite but it doesn't seem necessary - I'm really liking the results I'm getting.

ThomasMeeks wrote:

wickededge wrote:


Clay, I suspect many of us can go to 1000 grit diamonds for lapping. Would it be of any use to lap the micro fine ceramics against other ceramic stones for further refinement? Or would this have hardly any effect, since the lapping material is exactly as hard as the stone you want to lap?

mark76 wrote:


I think the surface finish you'll get with the 1000# diamonds is probably more than sufficient. Rubbing the stones together afterward should work well to give a final smoothing to the surface.

wickededge wrote:


[EDIT (8/25/2012): Clay says he may have used the wrong length-scale for this image. See Clay's update post(s) and my follow-up after this post (in this thread) for the corrected image(s) and number(s).]

Thanks Clay! Very interesting.

By my measurements, that 100 micron line is 476 pixels wide and 186 pixels tall.
Using the Pythagorean Theorem, I get that the line is about 511 pixels long.

So there are about 5 pixels per micron.

The wavelength of visible light is 0.38 to 0.74 microns.
So the wavelength of light is around 2 to 4 pixels!

Sincerely,
--Lagrangian

P.S. Theoretically, the best possible resolution for an optical microscopes is around half a wavelength, which is approximately 0.2 microns. See Nikon's microscopy website for details.
www.microscopyu.com/articles/optics/index.html

P.P.S. Clay, if your camera can take pictures which are uncompressed (such as RAW, TIFF, or PNG), then I would be quite curious to examine one or two uncompressed images.

Lagrangian,

I think I did the last scale incorrectly. Here is another, uncompressed TIFF with the scale added using a much simpler and more accurate method: Uncompressed Image It's still been shrunken by Blogger. If you send me your email address, I can send you the full image via dropbox or something similar - it's over 28 MB in size.

Hi Clay,

Thanks! I sent you a private message with my e-mail.

Sincerely,
--Lagrangian