{"id":5955,"date":"2019-10-19T23:43:03","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T03:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/?p=5955"},"modified":"2019-10-21T20:07:31","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T00:07:31","slug":"felt-honing-wheel-for-the-tormek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/19\/felt-honing-wheel-for-the-tormek\/","title":{"rendered":"Felt honing wheel for the Tormek"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Tormek<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For a long time, I have not liked the leather honing wheel on the Tormek<\/strong>. I never used it for general sharpening because I prefer stones, but even for knives, gouges, and an occasional touch up of other edges, I find it fragments easily and does not hold the honing compound as well as I would like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finally got around to setting up the wheel with felt<\/strong>. It was easy to remove the leather and scrape clean the plastic base of the wheel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got the felt from McMaster<\/a>. I first tried PSA-backed felt just for the convenience of applying it to the wheel. The hardest available in this style was “Firm<\/a>” F1. A 3\/16″-thick strip proved to be still too soft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The harder<\/strong> “Hard<\/a>” felt is available only in sheets without the PSA backing. I cut the 1\/8″-thick, 12″ x 12″ sheets into strips and applied them with 3M General Purpose 45 spray adhesive<\/a> using simple butt joints to make a continuous layer around the wheel. The S2-20 (durometer 50A) works best. The S2-32 (durometer 80A) is nominally about half as compressible as the S2-20 but the difference does not seem to matter for this purpose. I prefer the texture of the S2-20 as it seems to grab the honing compound better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I use the wheel for fine finishing, I charged it with 0.5 micron diamond<\/strong>. Mineral oil-based paste<\/a> and water-based spray<\/a> will both work but I think the paste is better. They cut fast but can get expensive over time. An economical alternative<\/strong> is a stick of Formax “green micro fine honing compound,”<\/a> which I surmise is also about 0.5 micron, available from Woodcraft<\/a>. Of course, it cannot cut as fast as diamond but with patience it can still produce an excellent edge.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My preference is mineral oil-based synthetic diamond paste from Beta Diamond Products<\/a>. It cuts fast and consistently, and a little bit goes a long way. I find the jar easier to deal with than the syringe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bottom line:<\/strong> the felt replacement works very nicely; I like it a lot better than the leather wheel. It is especially helpful for knives, gouges, and is even handy for quick touch ups of plane blades and chisels. I keep these touch ups very light because I don’t want to round the edge too much, which would interfere the next time I work the edge on stones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a long time, I have not liked the leather honing wheel on the Tormek. I never used it for general sharpening because I prefer stones, but even for knives, gouges, and an occasional touch up of other edges, I find it fragments easily and does not hold the honing compound as well as I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jigs-and-fixtures","category-tools-and-shop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5955"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6011,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955\/revisions\/6011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}