damaged 8000 waterstone

[Matt Wilkins]

hi,

i just purchased an 8000 japanese waterstone from leevalley. its called a 'gold stone' and indeed it is goldy colour. it was quite convex (hump in the middle). to fix it i started to rub it with my old polycrystalline 'super fine' diamond stone. i used plenty of water for this and all my subsequent attempts. anyway, the diamond stone is pretty worn out or i was too impatient, so i switched to my reddy coloured 800 waterstone. that trued up the 8000 stone in short order! however red flecks about 0.5mm to 1mm in diameter were left in the surface of the gold coloured 8000 stone!!

so i guess my lovely smooth 8000 stone had nasty coarse 800 pieces embedded in it. to fix it i used some 2000 sandpaper on glass. then i rubbed with my 'super fine' diamond. after a while i eliminated most of the red flecks but there are still a lot of discoloured (slight grayish) spots anywhere from a 0.5mm to 1mm in diameter on the surface. i'm not sure what these are, maybe gouges from where the pieces of 800 stone got ripped out? or perhaps an 8000 stone has these all the way through, and i couldn't see them when i bought the stone since they dress the top to look uniform? i suspect not. it looks like i've ruined my stone. to test, i use the ends of the stone (mainly unsullied by my stupidity since i didn't rub much at either end) on a plane iron and i see it gets the back lovely and shiny very quickly whereas the middle (with the pock marks or whatever they are) does not.

anyone have any ideas on what i can do, or indeed if what i've described is really what happened, perhaps i've missed something?

thank you

matt

[Ed G]

All may not be lost. I true my 8000 grit water stone on a piece of 220 grit wet/dry sandpaper which I glued to a sheet of glass. Try it with lots of water to wash away the swarf and a new piece of sandpaper. I do it in the kitchen sink and use the vegetable sprayer thing to wash off the glass and paper.

Ed

[Lawrence A. Ramsey]

[Steve Knight]

use will fix it. it almost sounds normal. but wear will fix it with no problems.

[hedgehog]

[Preston Andreas]

Try using it for awhile and see if it doesn't work for you. If it doesn't, I guarantee that Lee Valley will take it back if you are dissatisfied.

Preston

[Matt Wilkins]

ok, i'll keep using it for a while and see how it goes. so far, i can easily see that it is polishing my plane iron more than my 4000 stone does. hard to know if it is doing a good a job as it could if the stone didn't have these marks on it. after all, i haven't had an 8000 stone before! anyway i'll see if these marks reduce over time.

thanks for the responses,

matt

Prest> Try using it for awhile and see if it doesn't work for you. If it doesn't,