How to Super Flatten Arkansas stones 

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The good news is you need to flatten it once and some touching from time to time should be enough, thank you for watching 🤝

gracias, lamentablemente no hablo español, puede preguntarme en el comentario si tiene preguntas y haré todo lo posible para responder sus preguntas.

Thank you for watching, glad you find this useful :)

Try that and let me know how flat it will come out :)

Flatten your stones and sharpen your thicknesser knives at the same time!

forget about it, just buy a shapton.

🙂👍 This is the French pronunciation when they first discovered Arkansas, but the British was pronouncing it the way I did, however now it is illegal in Arkansas to use the British pronunciation 🤔

Thank you for your comment, happy to read that.

Oil is thicker and slippery for flattening yet difficult to clean! I use mineral oil for honing only.

Try amateur telescope making sites they sell almost all sizes

Try it out, but make it as thin as you can it should work. By the way this technique can give you acceptable flatness but not an optical flatness! Good luck.

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I have them but I don’t won’t to wear them down so quickly, this is another method that I was experimenting with and it gives a decent results. Of course you can use diamond stones if you like.

The law of diminishing returns...

Thank you for your comment, I used this method back in a days when I was making a telescope, it is used on a round mirrors hence it allows for rotating after a random number of strokes, this method can produce 1/12 of a wavelength flat surface which is flat enough for optical system and of course not required on a sharpening stone, if you maintain slight random side to side offsets as I did in this video you should be able to get a good flat that is enough for sharpening and even more than enough, not sure if you tried this before and if so I will be surprised if you didn’t get a good flat out of this method.

@@TheWoodCrafter1 Thanks for the reply. Yes, I used this method myself years ago in order to flatten 3 bricks (lengh/width ratio 1:2) which in a second step were used to flatten water sharpening stones. Measuring the diagonals on the bricks with a good straight edge it became clear, the stones are not dead flat, it was a saddle surface. A very small deviation but definitely measureable. I tweaked my method and added strokes in the diagonal directions in order to minimize the deviation, but I never got the bricks as flat as I wanted to. Regarding the theory behind it is absolutely clear that the method will only work (which means as flat as you want) correctly with round pieces or stones, not on long stones which will not allow strokes in any directions.

@@carstengriewatsch4624 Thank you for sharing your experience, you are right this method was used to flatten round objects, specifically for optics, I have tried other methods that I have access to, to flatten these stones but never get them as flat as I wanted, as I do have previous experience in making optics, I did manage to flatten these stones using the 3-plate method to a satisfying level for the job they will be used for and I measured them diagonally on both ends and they were very good! maybe because they are only 2 inches wide and I was using some circular strokes from time to time in addition to offsetting them slightly. I've watched your video already and yes you have a good valid point there, however if I need to make a reference flat then this method won’t be the way to go, but for sharpening woodworking tools and no access to flattening plate or similar machinist tool, the method I have used produced the best flat I could achieve on these stones compared with other methods that I have access to. I know that metal scrapping is the best way to flatten metal flats, but as you know it can’t be applied on sharpening stones.

It still get's it flatter than a diamond plate :D

@@carstengriewatsch4624 Three stone method is industrial standard for creating flat surfaces. If you do it right precision is absurd. If it didn't work something went wrong. I think it's great to know we have access to industry standard flattening process without any fancy equipment but for me it's overkill. For knife sharpening as long as a stone is flat enough that no light passes under a ruler it's good enough to make an edge that cuts paper towel. Hair whittling is a good challenge but not very practical since the blade doesn't hold the edge.