Choosing a grinder

They are supposed to be interchangable.

Depends on how you face it. :-)

:The rest comes up and goes left instead of right.

You are right. I can see both locations for the jig to attach. So it can handle both configurations. Thanks for the correction!

Turn it around, and it'll look just like the others.

I can grind out a serious nick on the Tormek, and finish on 4000 and

What is it that makes you guys think all of this takes massive amounts of time?

I still like my DMT plates for back flattening, but the Tormek really works for lots of us. I have a Baldor 1800 rpm grinder with good wheels, waterstones, the works! I'm one of those folks who sells off tools that don't pay off, and used Tormeks sell very well.

I _use_ the thing a lot, a _real_ lot!

Dials??? I don't see any dials on the Tormek. The Jet looks like it may have a small range of variable speed and that is about it. When you speak of dials, are you perhaps talking about the angle setter?

Wayne

No. He's talking about the height adjustment on the metal jig holder.

You can see it in this picture

Are you sure? The support in the Worksharp is an aluminum platform that the entire tool back rests on. It extends right up to the cutting surface. Now it may be the case that even this doesn't make much difference for heavy grinding. I'm not sure.

The Worksharp has an aluminum platform, not a bar.

It's a platform. You have total contact on the back. I guess for Japanese tools with a hollow the contact wouldn't be as good....

I believe the heatsink extends right up to the cutting surface, so it's about as close to the edge as possible.

Now I did see a review in which it was noted that for heavy grinding, the tool got kind of hot. I don't know how much the heatsink helps. Also if you want to do anything other than grind to one of the preset angles, you can't use that heatsink.

Do you use this thing freehand or do you have some jigs? One thing I would like is to be able to grind uniform bevels on tools so that I can tell what my microbevels are doing by the line where they intersect the primary bevel.

Here are a few quotes from a knife forum:

"I used my x-coarse DMT to reprofile one side of a Jess Horn in ZDP-189 to a uniform 12 degrees. It took about a thousand passes on the stone, I was also pressing fairly hard, about 25 lbs (used scale). I then used a 200 grit silicon carbide waterstone to bring the other side flat with the primary grind in about two minutes."

"My experience with the DMT extra coarse stone is that the first one I purchased cut very well for about a half hour, then "broke in" to cut OK for about 6 to 8 hours and then there were no more diamonds left over most of the stone."

"I have been told that normal steel tends to pull out the diamonds and this certainly has been my experience. This presumably is much more of a problem with very coarse grits than with finer grits. Again, this has been my experience in that I have had a couple of those cheap diamond paddles for many years in medium and fine, and they still work. I'm sure they have 50 to 100 hours each on them, at least."

"Also agree that diamond does not cut as fast as good waterstones (especially green carbide ones) with the same grit."

"I still am in love with the D8XX for coarse sharpening work like regrinding an edge. But I just got a few 36 grit ceramic belts for the

--------------------------------------------------------- That's it for quotes.

Now I have a Silicon Carbide green stone and it's not fast enough for reshaping an edge. I have a Shapton 120 grit and it's not fast enough either. I also don't have a way that I like to flatten either one of these. The guy who suggested a bench grinder said he could grind a nick out of a chisel in a few seconds. So the talk about the diamonds seems to indicate that they aren't particularly fast, and they might wear out rapidly. It does seem like people experience different results.

Can anybody comment on the relative speed of a Norton 3X grinding wheel to a belt sander or disk sander?