Description
The quantity of basis material and disposable abrasive atop are not what contributes most to the cost of these a la carte abrasive fields, it is the SHAPE that you’re buying, the SHAPE that you’ll find ‘in nature’ are hard to source.
This took two hours to carve in and polish.
15 micron 3M diamond lapping film, 3×4″, on a 1″ thick sheet of acrylic that has been shaped via the ‘the jarrod plate‘ to be a 6.5’Ø down the 4″ length and a 25’Ø shape across the 3″ width.
Used various abrasives purchased from Taylor Toolworks to polish the shaped surface for accepting a 3×4″ slice of 3M Diamond Lapping Film (the one with the peel-off self-adhesive backing). In this case, it has the 15-micron orangey one.
Perfect as a bench stone to be used just as any old bench stone, I think. I’d use with fine mineral oil.
You can do it in the stropping direction if you must, but if you’ve got that sheet properly lubricated at all points, it ain’t the sheet you’ve got to worry about, it is the razor getting dinged on its edge from 15 microns’ chunks coming at it at a bad angle…the finer films’ base is thinner and thinner (to accommodate the smaller and smaller max ‘height’ of the abrasives), and so with them you’ve really got to obsess about not dinging their baby-fragile surfaces. But this one does not damage easily. This ~1250#-grit slice is for me the coarsest of the popular films that I think’s still fine for overtaking new production, and you get all the durability and speed benefits from it. Refine with a hard Ark file, is what I’d do.
