Nice little mail call. These three waterstones expand me options. I only had 3k and 10k waterstones so far and i was curious about how a little more range and resolution would feel.
Also, this dull-like-a-butter-knife Thiers Issard frameback. It's my first frameback, and it was a bitch to hone (I did that two days ago). It just would not pass the packing peanut test off the stone. A real mystery to me. In my limited experience, I always manage to get the edge sharp on the stone without stropping, if I used a light enough touch and alternate the sides frequently, ending on leading edge strokes. But not with this guy. It wouldn't even shave arm hair without stropping.
In my mental model, this means that the steel is ductile and forms a burr, but I'll gladly be corrected by any Honemeister who actually knows what they're doing😅
Either way, I have up after it somewhat push cut into the packing peanut, but was a bit disheartened when I compared it to the pushing-into-a-cloud sharpness of other straights. We'll see how it goes. Either I'll figure it out or maybe the steel has lost its temper and is a paper weight now?
Except that stropping makes it sharper, though! This points towards ductile steel forming a burr, rather than brittle steel chipping when refined, no?
I'll explore both directions, starting with thinking about better burr removal
Could be. A steel that's too soft to take a good edge is still one with heat treatment issues. If you're stropping for sharpness, removing burr and/or shaping burr in that way, the resulting apex won't be very well-formed and uniform from heel to toe.
Yeah, that sounds right, unfortunately