An autoclave, right? they recomend that in the instruction manual. good idea if you use it for kitchen knives and dont whant to cross contaminate with your other knives.
i use jif and a scotchbrite pad
(for those of you who dont know jif is a very harsh liquid cleaner that is fairly abrasive)
brings my stones up nice and clean
Steel wool? Cool. I've been useing the scrubber-side of a scrubby sponge with a lot of generic comet (one large blast to the sponge for each stone).
I like the idea of grabbing a couple of more stones/rods at the next gun show 05/07,08. These are the things I never remember, I'll set up a reminder on my cell for this one.
I also gently grind one edge of the course stones together after I clean them. I try to do this in a way that 'sharpens" them. It does seem to make them remove more metal on that edge.
Thanks for the ideas,
---Tom
I normally use supermarket-own-brand cream cleaner on a sponge, which works quite well. Recently I put them in an ultrasonic cleaner at work and the dirt just fell away almost instantly!
I have now tried the eraser and my results were much better than by washing them. I just used one of the soft pencil erasers. Seems to work equally well on both brown and white stones.
We've got several autoclaves at school (different sizes), but I'm afraid I won't be allowed to put my stones in them .
Btw, why's an autoclave good for cleaning them ? The point of those things is to sterilise stuff, not clean it. There's just hot steam under pressure in there, nothing moving.
It does a good job on the grey stones, it takes everything off. The white stones, i guess because it is finder it doesnt come out. So she put em in another machine I think.
The grey stones come out super clean. Like they were NEW.
The erasers work for me. The jury is back on them and it's the method for me that uses the least amount of work and time. As I get deeper into sharpening, I'll give something else a try that may prove better.