Hi all,

I recently obtained the new Micro Fine ceramic stones and finally had some time to use them. I wrote a blog post about them. You can read it here.

A brief peek ahead: I had a fine shave.



If there are other people who have these stones: I'm also really curious about your experiences!

Nice writeup Mark!

Time to pass the knife around Also, we need some shaving video from you soon if that is going to be your testing criteria!

Nice. Just got mine too. Used them once so far. Best edge yet!

Did you lap yours Mark? I didn't and they seemed fine.

Ken

(BTW - I have the same knife, it's excellent!)

Yes, I lapped my Micro Fine ceramics. I don't know whether it was really necessary. But Clay recommended us to do so and I saw some scratches on the blade when I hadn't lapped them yet, so I thought I'd better be sure than sorry.

mark76 wrote:


Kinda the same place I was. I decided to try them for a bit "stock" to get a feel for them. I figured I could always lap them later. I did take the corners off my 1200/1800s to chamfer them a bit to be more like the micro fine (I thought that was a better design) Caused a small chip on one corner, but nothing that will impact their function.

Ken

I received my micro ceramics last week. After using them on a few knives, I was pleased with the results until I lapped them last night and used them on a knife this morning. MUCH better results to say the least.
I started at the 100/200 and progressed up through the 800/100, rotating the ceramics after about 8 to 10 strokes. I used a bit of dish soap on a sponge to wipe off the stones and ceramics to clean out the debris on the each. I couldn't be more pleased with the mirror edges after lapping the ceramics.
Unrelated to this, I'm having problems with cleaning and loading diamond paste on my strops.
I cleaned them really well, smoothed them and loaded them. When I use them, I am getting residue left on the edges and them seem a little sticky or tacky. Any thoughts on this??

My experience with the strops is that the tackier the better. I get the best results when my strops are really grabbing the metal.

Deputy115 wrote:

Deputy115 wrote:


I had a different result as far as mirror edges. I sharpened a Kershaw Blur from 100 diamond thru 1600 ceramics. Then I switched to 5,000/10,000 Choseras before going on to the 1.4/0.6 micro ceramics. The mirror edge after the 10,000 Choseras was great, to the naked eye. But after the micro ceramics, the mirror edge had changed - inconsistent polish thorughout the edge that just didn't look right. Has anyone else noticed this?

However, at 400x magnification, the edges seemed about the same.

I couldn't get the lightening right with regular photos showing the mirror edge difference but I did take some 400x photos of both 10,000 Chosera and 0.6 micro ceramic edges.

After 10,000 Choseras:



And here are two more photos of the same blade after the 0.6 micro ceramics (different lightening):



This is just one knife so I'll try some more after lapping the micro ceramics.

holymolar wrote:


Not quite the same experience. But tonight I sharpened another knife, finishing with the micro fine ceramics and again I noticed some scratches similar to the ones in the first photograph of the edge in my blog post. Don't know exactly why.

Clay, can you tell us why you think lapping the stones would be a good idea?

For two reasons - 1) I had noticed that one of the brown stones had a rougher surface than the other 2) I'd read somewhere that the only difference between the Spyderco Fine and Extra Fine stones was how they were finished i.e. they were the same stone but one that was lapped to a finer surface which led me to think it would be worth a try since the same company (Coorstek) that is making our stones makes the stones for Spyderco. I'll try to dig up the post I read for reference later. I contacted my rep at Coorstek to ask about it but he didn't know anything and is supposed to get back to me.

mark76 wrote: