How To - Attaching a Sharpening Stone to a Base

If you sharpen knives and have stones sooner or later you'll likely want to mount a stone to a base of some sort. You may have a favorite stone that you've worn down so thin that you're sure it'll crack the next time you use it, or you have a stone that has cracked or is known to be cracklicious, could be you simply prefer mounted stones for the added height and knuckle clearance afforded, or maybe you have a mounted stone that has come loose from it's base and needs attaching.

Whatever the case may be you will probably tackle the job pretty much the same way, you'll select your base substrate and get to gluing.

Below I put together a quick & dirty tutorial on a couple of things that I found to be helpful tips to success when attaching a sharpening stone to a base.

The first thing to consider is the base material to be used. I'm old school & prefer wood like cypress as this is traditional. While wood is OK for non-soaking stones you might be better served with something a bit more stable for stone requiring some extended stay in the pond before use. Maybe something like granite, marble, glass, tile (etc) would lend themselves to the task of long soaks better than wood.


In the below tutorial I'm showing a natural stone that has come loose from it's factory mounted base & needs to get some repair time on the bench. In this case we have an uneven natural stone bottom and hunks of epoxy to deal with.

 

I decided to use my disc grinder to clean up the stone & base because it makes things go real fast - real quick. You could use a wide belt grinder or even some sandpaper if you had too, although myself, I'd rather buy a new stone than use the sandpaper method.

 

Now you should have both base & stone reasonably flat. As you can see on this natural stone there are depressions remaining after cleaning it up and that's OK because the bottom only needs to be "flat enough", it doesn't need to be engineers dead ass flat for this to work. Plus, these little depressions will hold more epoxy which can't be a bad thing, right?

 

This part is important - selecting the correct epoxy. I can tell you from experience that water resistant does not equal water proof in the world of epoxy. I suggest going with a waterproof epoxy since you'll be using these stones in water....duh! I used System Three's T-88 because that's what I have the most of on hand but you don't need to special order such expensive epoxy just for this task, head on over to your hardware store and grab some Devcon 2-Ton - that's waterproof - and it's cheap and easily found.

 

I like a rough surface on both stone & base so I do nothing but clean the surfaces with alcohol prior to glue up. Make sure that both surfaces are completely dry before applying the epoxy.

 

Now it's done and after the required cure time the stone will be back in service.

 

 

Murray Carter Damascus Neck Knife is Copperized

Here's a weird project that a friend tasked me to try. He sent me one of his Murray Carter damascus neck knives and requested that I etch it with copper. I gladly accepted the challenge because when else would I get to try this, not many people are willing to fork over such a pricey knife for an experiment.

Here's the results...

 

Pretty crazy, huh?

Monthly Payment Plan.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how tough times are and how hard it would be for me to buy one of my own knives if the roles were reversed and I was the customer. It seems that I would have to save up the money for many months before I could even place an order. This made me think about a way to help with this situation, something that could help the would be potential customers as well as myself the maker.

What I've come up with is something that I think might just be what fits the bill here pretty good. I'll now offer our pre-order knives to be purchased with a monthly payment plan. The plans will be set up in either 2, 4, or 6 month time frames with equal automatic monthly payments being made.

I believe that this will allow for some people to become a knife purchasing customer who might not otherwise be able to make such a purchase and for myself this will allow me to better plan and work more effectively while hopefully also taking more orders....all good.

My plan of attack from the knifemaking side would be to forecast my workload ahead of time to eventually be able to meet a finished knife with a final payment. Initially this may be a tough goal to measure up to but I feel strongly that having orders laid out with payment deadlines will allow me to adjust and meet customer goals in a much better fashion than I can currently offer.

I really think that this payment program has potential and I hope that you'll give it consideration. Please see Dave Martell Knives - Payment Program for details.

PS - I'm still more than happy to accept orders but as always those paid for in advance will have priority.

PSS - Knives will be made in the order to which initial payments were received. This means when you start paying you get in line on that day. The only way someone could get ahead of you is to make an early (full) payment. All work will be done as fairly as possible in order.

Using Synthetic Fingerstones

*Note - Please excuse the crappy pictures. I took them while working in my stone room under fluorescent lighting.


Here's the stones I used. The top one shown is the size and shape of what we're selling (you would receive a qty of 4 when ordering). The bottom two stones show a worn down stone that's been snapped in half to make two little fingerpad sized stones. I like to have both sizes because the larger works great on flats while the smaller goes in and out of irregularities and easily conforms to curves.

Here's the knife I started with. It's one of the "practice yanagis" that we used to sell.

First I begin by flattening the blade road with a coarse stone to make it as even as possible. Once that's done I move onto the King 800x to make a matte finish and bring out contrast. Here's what it looks like after the King 800x is used.

Now I break out the synthetic fingerstones and test to see what I have. Here's the initial results.

Not bad but look at that bird's beak - we've got to do something with that. So I go back to my coarse stone, remove the bird's beak, and do all the above over again.

Following that I break out the polishing stones and do the edge bevel but I scuffed up my nice pretty blade road so I grab the synthetic fingerstones once again and hit the entire blade road and edge bevel. Here's the end results.

*Note - These pictures taken the next day outside in natural daylight.

So there you have it - Dave's secret weapon de-bunked and now available for sale. What you see is exactly what it does. Keep in mind that the knife used above is a $29 (retail) knife giving these results, imagine what a good knife would look like?

Synthetic Fingerstones available HERE

*Notes: 
In the above pictures I used the King 800x as the base layer for using the fingerstones because I've found this to be the quickest way to decent results. The King 800x base leaves a slightly darkish look so if you prefer lighter you'd use something like the synthetic aoto, Suehiro Rika, Kitayama, Superstones, or whatever you want instead. You'll be surprised by how these fingerstones give results differently based on what stone was used directly before them.

 On surface texture, this is also somewhat effected by the stone used before the fingerstones, however, the fingerstones themselves generally provide the perfect slippery surface texture that is looked for when using a yanagiba.

Western (Yo) to Eastern (Wa) Handle Conversion

Besides our normal sharpening service and making custom knives we also do all sorts of upgrades & reconfiguration work as well. One such example is this Misono Swedish Steel (carbon) Dragon Sujihiki that we converted from a western handle to a wa handle.

The handle we installed is HI Cook Pine & streaked buffalo made by Stefan Keller of JapaneseHandles.com

BEFORE

AFTER

JapaneseKnifeSharpening.com

Martell Knives

Here's the most recent knife out of the shop. It's a Martell 240mm gyuto (Japanese style chef's knife) with western handle in O-1 with ringed gidgee handle and black ash burl bolster. Liners are black G-10, stainless steel pins, and the tang is tapered.

Martell Knives

Martell Knives - Our Goal

At Martell Knives our goal is simple.....

To be a leader in the High Performance kitchen knife market.


For seven years Dave Martell (that's me) has been sharpening knives at the highest level (see JapaneseKnifeSharpening.com), providing repairs & modifications to Japanese knives, and studying literally thousands of knives that passed through my hands in close detail. The knowledge & experience gained from all of this hard work is now being used to build my own line of kitchen knives.

One thing that you can count on with Martell Knives is that you'll receive
"The Sharpest Out-Of-The-Box Edge" - guaranteed!

Martell Knives - #1 is Done!

This is the first knife I've ever made - #1

It's not perfect but it's the best I can do at this time. Hopefully the rest will only get better. :)