I inherited most of the tools I own from my grandfather and my uncle, and
with their tools I got a number of oilstones ranging from fairly coarse all
the way up through an extremely hard and fine translucent Arkansas stone.
(BTW - This may be the only time I will ever beat Todd's price on something,
since free beats $3.  Even the fancy boxes were free - I made them out of
pallet wood.  But I digress.)  The coarser stones were badly cupped, and
while they were fine for chisels (you just needed to control the angle of
attack to keep the blade in a locally flat region), they were starting to be
a real problem for plane irons.  I tried a bunch of things (short of
actually spending money), but what finally worked was just rubbing two of
the stones together until they were both flat.  This does take a while and
you do have to be careful not to turn a cupped stone into a convex stone,
but if you keep checking your progress with a straightedge, you can't go
wrong.  I didn't verify the flatness with a laser beam or anything, but they
passed my straightedge test and they seem to work fine for plane irons now.
These stones and an old hand grinder with an extremely coarse 5" wheel for
rough shaping (also free - scavenged from a friend's grandfather's basement)
are all I use.

Mike Recchione

JF1616@a... wrote:

> Greetings all,
>
> With the recent discussion on flattening stones, what about oilstones.
> I use ss and waterstones, but got a couple of oilstones thrown in with a
> recent garage sale purchase (old workmutt, I never had one before) I
> thought oilstones were suppose to remain fairly flat, but at least one
> of these needs some work. It looks like they're in the medium grit range
> beneath the gunk. Is there a best method for flattening them?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Janet Fisher
> yes, still here, now on the west coast of Fla.
>
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