Work Sharp Sharpening System - Manual (Page 9)

There is one final wheel available and
that is the leather strop wheel. This is a
glass plate with leather bonded to one
face. It can be used leather side up for
polishing the flat back of a chisel or plane
blade or one of the odd shaped cutters
you elect to sharpen from the top using
the included upper tool rest.
You can also turn it over,
leather side down, and use it
in conjunction with the built-in
adjustable tool rest to polish
the bevel angle established
by the positive positioning of
the lower built-in tool rest. It
comes with polishing com-
pound to load the leather
strop surface.
One last comment on the very
flat glass plates before we
move on to examining the
machine in more detail. These strong,
tempered glass plates are amazingly flat
on both sides and uniform at 10mm in
thickness so they make possible the use
of everything from very coarse grits to
grits smaller than one micron (one mil-
lionth of a meter!) with equally fine re-
sults.
Work Sharp supplies standard with
the unit 150mm diameter pressure
sensitive grits in FEPA (European)
ratings of P120, P400, P1000 and Mi-
cromesh 3600. Other coarse grits
can easily be obtained from hardware
or woodworking stores while other
grades of finer grits can be found in
most auto paint stores.
These very flat glass plates will pro-
duce a perfectly flat bevel angle un-
like wheels which produce a concave
bevel angle potentially weakening the
the cutting edge that is doing all the
work for you.