Having flattened using the side of the Tormek wheel in the past, I would recommend not. Unless you only have very minor flattening of the back to do, it takes an incredibly long time on the Tormek. Coarse Emery cloth, coarse sandpaper, x-coarse diamond stones (followed by the finer grades) all work much, much quicker than the Tormek for flattening backs (and fronts for that matter). Don't get me wrong, I think the Tormek is a fine tool, but is very slow if you have to make anything other than minor changes to the tool. And remember - we are talking about using the sides of the super-slow Tormek wet-wheel here for flattening, not a standard high (or even slow) speed grinder. NEVER use the sides of those wheels for grinding. My 2 cents, William R. Monroe On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Thomas Cole <tcole at cruzio.com> wrote: > I'm not sure what you mean by having the natural skills to sharpen by > hand. If you have a jig to hold a tool at a constant angle to the grinding > surface, whatever method you use, you're going to get a better result than > if the tool is hand held in my view. The reason I say so is that the cutting > edge of a knife/chisel/plane blade, etc., is a microscopic part of the > tool which can be easily damaged by the slightest clumsiness. This is the > beauty of the Tormek, that it pretty well eliminates the klutz factor. > > Thanks for pointing out using the sides of the wheel for flattening the > back of chisels. I had forgotten that. > > Tom Cole > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101010/bc95dacf/attachment.htm>
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