11 months, 3 weeks ago-
Posts
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Mark,
My favorite clean-up for my sintered laps is using barkeeper’s friend and a scotch pad. It removed the build up rather well. When completed they run smooth and cut well. I usually scrub until the entire surface looks brassy new.
W@rd
is it sintered or plated. if sintered your wasting a lot of your time, your hitting more metal than diamond. sintered is diamond added to metal powder then heat fused to a solid surface, leaving more metal than diamond surface. your better off using the cheap china made laps who’s surface is mostly all diamond, much faster than sintered. what grit is it? gemmakermz@cs.com
Scott,
I use sinteres lap if I am working on a competition stone. I purchased the sintered laps after ruining my plated solid steel laps after when I took action on some very bad advice. The bad advice I got was to use Aluminum Oxide Dressing Bars to expose more diamond on the plated laps. The aluminum oxide dressing bars are made from, of course, aluminum oxide, which is the second hardest mineral, 9 on the Moh’s Scale. The bars basically stripped the plating and the diamond that was supposedly being held in place by plating.
These dressing bars are actually intended to be used on sintered laps, not on plated laps. I have a dedicated bar for each of my singtered laps.
When ever the lap looses its aggressiveness or starts to leave scratches turn the lap on slowly, give it lots of water and drag the dressing bar across the lap with minimal pressure till the water appears to become cloudy. Then remove the dressing bar, and rinse the lap thoroughly.
Tom Mitchell
Floridausing a dressing stick is fine on plated laps but not too aggressively accept on very coarse grits and on nothing finer than 600. keep in mind the finer the grit the thinner the plating. when i worked at crystalite we tried to plate to 65% the thickness of the diamond. it was nickel plated. nickel work hardens and tightens on the diamond plus most diamond used was semiconductor type so it electro-formed around the diamond. most impure diamonds are semiconductors. i generally don’t recommend finer than 1200-1500 as the plating gets thin. and any real uniform quality or broken in 1200 you can go directly to a tin lap with 50,000 diamond powder and get a great polish. as for sintered, a waist of money as your not getting the use of all the diamond you paid for. and as it does wear it will be uneven. yes some plated laps are very aggressive, some need to be broken in. i’ve seen complaints on the 3000 most, likely do to more that one layer attached, plated on unevenly. i have one and i used a 1200 grit sharpening stick on it. finally carefully got it to cut clean and still is fast.
gemmakermz
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