Harbor Freight 1x30 Belt Sander

Cliff:

I am well familiar with Skinner's work on operative conditioning. The Skinner box is Psych 101. Skinner has been widely criticized for his attempts at applying the laboratory operant chamber to real life applications. As an aside, my mother was a clinical psychologist and when I learned about Skinner's work in college, and how he used his children as test subjects, I was quite thankful my mother had a far different research ethic.

In sum:

I agree that proper negative feedback can result in positive change, and that correcting "bad habits" is difficult especially in the adult brain.

I respectfully disagree with how you've applied those principles to this topic for the reasons that Chum has noted. I the end, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree and that is fine with me.

More on topic, I used my 1x30 on the Marble's Bolo today, which is described in the Discord thread. Not bad habits, just lack of skill. Still, much faster than doing the work by hand.

I thought I was going to read about a 1x30 grinder. I have actually found this discussion a lot more interesting

It's also a good example if disagreeable debate without personal attacks.

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chad234
Skinner has been widely criticized for his attempts at applying the laboratory operant chamber to real life applications.

Most people who pioneer a fairly revolutionary idea tend to have blinders, which is understandable because of the impact of the work. Hence why it starts with Skinner (for most) a sensible understanding has to extend much beyond him. No different that Darwin and he focus on natural selection though we know now in many cases it isn't the critical factor in gene frequency distribution.

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I respectfully disagree with how you've applied those principles to this topic ...

I don't even know what you disagree with exactly. The point that seems to be contested is that using an expensive knife would be too harsh a feedback. My response to that is simple - if that is your viewpoint then that entire perspective on learning is wrong because you are focused on failure and avoiding it. Learning is maximized (rate and retention of gains) through :

-obvious (known) and clear goals
-segmentation of goals into practical achievements which allow constant advancement in real time
-immediate (and important/critical) feedback

The stronger these aspects the more rapid the pace of learning.

If your feedback is weak and it can be ignored (you grind poorly and damage a knife but don't care about it anyway), if you don't have clear goals, or if the segmentation is too large (progress isn't recognized) then all of these stall learning.

If you were so focused on damaging the knife in grinding I would ask why are you designing a learning program with achievements you can not achieve to such an extent that failure is your main perspective.

Instead design a program which has clear achievements you can make every single time you sit down to grind, have an extremely low chance of failure, an extremely high chance of success and work towards a clear and well defined goal.

--

Now it is clear that there are very driven people who are not feedback influenced very much at all. But for the general populace it produces a large effect and the more significant it is the larger the effect.

Similar such as there are people would actually need failure because success makes them bored, they live for the challenge - hence you have to tailor programs ideally to students.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2014 08:45AM by CliffStamp.

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CliffStamp
I don't even know what you disagree with exactly. The point that seems to be contested is that using an expensive knife would be too harsh a feedback. My response to that is simple - if that is your viewpoint then that entire perspective on learning is wrong because you are focused on failure and avoiding it.

I disagree with notion that you should use your most expensive knife when you begin grinding, and that you would be better off using less expensive, less important to you, knives until you have a basic understanding of what you are doing. Did the driving/parking analogy not make any sense?

This doesn't mean you are solely focused on failure. I'm not sure why you say it is.


Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member

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Chum

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Mark a
pictures or it didnt happen....

Alright, I'll take pictures of it tonight and post them. btw the Aus8 in that Boker is noticeably harder to grind than the Aus8 in the CS knives I've worked on.

Here is my very first regrind with the Harbor Freight 1X30. It actually looks better now than it did. I think I went back after my initially attempt and cleaned it up a bit. That was some time ago. I haven't done anything with it since.

I find this particular knife very difficult to grind. It just seems harder than anything else I have worked on. I will probably wait to work on it further until I pick up some of those Norton Blaze 36 grit belts Cliff has mentioned.

btw, this knife has a sheath made by Tom Krein on it. It use to fit perfectly. My regrind attempt has given it some slop.













Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member

Well that was a resounding meh, I was honestly expecting worse.

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Mark a
Well that was a resounding meh, I was honestly expecting worse.

It was a lot worse initially. This is what I ended up with a clean up second attempt.... It looks like shit in person, I swear


Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member

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Chum

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CliffStamp
I don't even know what you disagree with exactly. The point that seems to be contested is that using an expensive knife would be too harsh a feedback. My response to that is simple - if that is your viewpoint then that entire perspective on learning is wrong because you are focused on failure and avoiding it.

I disagree with notion that you should use your most expensive knife when you begin grinding, and [assert] that you would be better off using less expensive, less important to you, knives until you have a basic understanding of what you are doing.

Same point of disagreement and point of assertion noted [in brackets] as Chum. You make a pretty strong leaping statement ,that my "entire perspective on learning is wrong" because I disagree with your position that starting with your most expensive knife makes for the most efficient way to learn how to re-grind on this power equipment. Simply, Chum and I both feel that the negative feedback is too strong relative to the potential positive gain. I was tempted to pull some of the boatload of peer reviewed pedagogic and cognitive neuroscience literature that demonstrates that principle. But again, I don't think we really disagree about the principles, but rather their applications to these facts.

So, if people follow your advice and ruin their most expensive (and their second,third and fourth) knife to learn a lesson in what not to do while re grinding with power equipment, more power (and apparently efficiency) to them and you. Maybe that's how they'll start training people at nuclear reactors, sky diving and tight rope walking schools too. That would be very efficient too.


Chum-
I found my first regrind of sorts, found stuck in the "shame" drawer. A Greco I bought from John at a local show about 15 years ago:




I think I snapped the tip off doing something stupid (no easy feat with a 1/8" carbon steel blade) and reground a new one. Thankfully, after mangling the handle, I did try to deepen the hollow grind.

Anyone with balls learned how to grind using their most expensive art piece knife for practice. Well known fact.

Well, apparently I stand corrected, and a eunuch. Thanks for the definitive statement on the subject OS.

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chad234
You make a pretty strong leaping statement ,that my "entire perspective on learning is wrong" because I disagree with your position that starting with your most expensive knife makes for the most efficient way to learn how to re-grind on this power equipment.

Not because of the disagreement but how it was argued which you again bring up :

"So, if people follow your advice and ruin their most expensive (and their second,third and fourth) knife ..."

Again, heavy and constant failure is nothing more than an indication of a program which is poorly designed and has impractical achievements -unless- heavy failure is what the student desires as a learning incentive (some actually do).

If someone is actually "ruining" multiple knives then congratulations they have made large scale uncorrected attempts which have already started the coding of incorrect techniques.

Again :

-have a clear and focused goal
-split the goal into practical achievements for constant incremental advancement
-have immediate feedback on all attempts to ensure proper techniques are learned/utilized

If your approach to learning how to grind is just stick a knife on a grinder and see what happens in a random manner I would still suggest that you use an expensive knife in the hope that maybe it would convince you that maybe something should change.

Learning isn't supposed to be constantly failure, it is actually supposed to be constant success.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2014 05:38AM by CliffStamp.

As an example :

[i7.photobucket.com]

This was a card done by a six year old as their first time doing much of the work involved (no stitching experience at all). They :

-located the basic pattern
-printed it
-cut out the basic shapes
-did the point work required (poking holes in the paper to allow the thread)
-did the stitching
-cut out the shapes
-did the gluing

The materials they used were all extremely expensive to them (meaning it was all the money they had they did not have the ability to buy any replacement materials if they were ruined [*]).

The consequences of failure were high as it was a birthday card for a friend and they wanted to 1-up another friend (which is insanely strong when you are a kid - and even an adult).

Yet :

-they were able to achieve a reasonable product for the very first time
-no significant wastage of materials
-had a very enjoyable time

Why? Because :

-there was a clear goal
-it was split into very small incremental tasks which were practical to achieve
-there was immediate feedback on all work so they learned what to do

I would estimate if they did this another 2-3 times they could do it completely independently.

The supervision/involvement is scaled back dramatically with each session unless they want to look at more advanced techniques such as folding cards/envelopes because a lot of people find even basic folding very challenging.

[*] Yes, they had to buy all of the materials from me even though they are a 6 year old kid and I don't have cheap materials. Now I gave the money back to their parents who gave it to them as a reward for learning/doing the above, but the kid doesn't know that. The reasons for this are based on principles noted in the above and others such as the value of a achievement is apportioned to the risk/effort involved in achieving it.

--

Are there better ways to teach than how I do it - obviously. It is one of the things I study semi-seriously and the way I teach now is not going to be the same as how I will teach a month from now because it if was it would mean I learned nothing in the next month (which is a kind of self-refuting ironic position really). But in no case is fear of failure and the consequences of it something even considered by any one I am teaching, but yet they all use materials which are of extremely high value and many times can not be replaced if destroyed.

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Chum

It will be interesting to see when QM is completely abandoned as being false

Quantum Theory is already known to be false in the sense that you appear to be using the word false (does it reflect the reality of the way the universe works), and it can never be false in the sense false is used in science (agrees with experiments under specific conditions).

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Most people have a correspondence theory of truth which is to say that something is true if it corresponds to reality. That means it is true that my name is Cliff Stamp if in reality my name actually is Cliff Stamp.However science doesn't operate from a correspondence theory of truth.

The starting presuppositions of science make it obvious that everything it produces is false under that view. Science is not based on reality but on our observations of reality and our deductions from those observations.

As it is known that none of the following are ideal/complete :

-our ability to perceive the universe as it exists
-how much information is so obtained
-methods of critical thought

then it is known that nothing produced from it is likely to be true from a correspondence theory of truth, i.e. the universe really behaves the way science describes it from an absolute perspective.

But Science has a coherence theory of truth which is to say that things are held to be true when they agree with the other things which are held to be true and the more agreement the more something is said to be true (the more conflict the more things are said to be false).

When an observation has been repeated enough to remove significant doubt it becomes true. When an explanation agrees with enough observations to be useful it is held to be true. In all cases there are circumstances or conditions applied. For example Newton's law of gravity is true when objects are on a large scale and moving far less than the speed of light.

Quantum Theory is known to be true the most that anything in science is known to be true. It has the highest tested agreement/predictive power of anything which is known empirically. But does it actually represent the reality of how things really behave - that is so unlikely to be true as it isn't even meaningful. But that isn't what science means by truth as noted.

--

The simplest way to understand it would be to think on this simple question :

"Hey man, how much does that knife weigh?"

And think about how you could answer it from :

"About six ounces."

to some ultra specific mass with the knife freshly cleaned and weighed in a vacuum, to an answer which specifies the mass as a function of the objects speed relative to the relative to the observer or describes it in terms of how it interacts with the Higgs field (which is what gives objects mass).

Are any of these more/less true or does it depend on what question you are really trying to answer? In most cases science progresses simply by learning how to ask better questions and at times it takes some pretty radical imagination to think up the question such as

-when Einstein asked the very simple but revolutionary question "What is the mass of that knife when you throw it?"

(special relativity, light always travels the same speed no matter the speed of the observer, i.e. light doesn't afraid of non-zero inertial reference frames)

-his later question "What is the mass of that knife when it is falling?"

(general relativity, gravity is curved space time, i.e., gravity and acceleration are the same hence why you feel heavier in an elevator going up as it is no different than being in a stronger gravity field)

or

-when Feynman asked "When you throw a knife, does it travel the same path when you look at it as when you don't?"

(collapse of quantum probability functions - i.e. the multi-path approach to interactions)

Some of these questions sound intensely idiotic which is why it takes very special people to ask them without making derp faces.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2014 10:25AM by CliffStamp.

In regards to regrinds on 1x30 :





However I think with a little work you could do the same to a regular 1x30 as it is just a drop feed system.

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CliffStamp
In regards to regrinds on 1x30 :





However I think with a little work you could do the same to a regular 1x30 as it is just a drop feed system.

that's great! the problem I have had is actually building the water trough/flaps so the water doesn't go everywhere. looks like he designed that well.

He also made a slower speed model with quick change belts. Add water and that would be really cool. His burr technique, cheap knives and creepy mannequin head aside.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2014 04:40PM by chad234.

Been looking into one of these. The mods in the video below look promising, all he needs is some kind of drip line with a petcock at the end for wet grinding. Figure for the cost of sending one knife out for a regrind, I could have a pretty decent setup.

video: [youtu.be]

-Nate

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CliffStamp
[ My response to that is simple - if that is your viewpoint then that entire perspective on learning is wrong because you are focused on failure and avoiding it. Learning is maximized (rate and retention of gains) through :

-obvious (known) and clear goals
-segmentation of goals into practical achievements which allow constant advancement in real time
-immediate (and important/critical) feedback

The stronger these aspects the more rapid the pace of learning.

Instead design a program which has clear achievements you can make every single time you sit down to grind, have an extremely low chance of failure, an extremely high chance of success and work towards a clear and well defined goal.

good ideas. i have ADD/ADHD and try to incorporate these ideas whenever i plan chores or a task.

Just to clarify before anyone heaps any praise on me for coming up with this, that is all basic teaching methodology. There is a lot of study into that now in neuroscience due to massive interest in brain plasticity which I am curious about and so have done some reading on. I am generally not-ignorant of teaching methodology in general having done it for a long time but I often brute force it which isn't ideal.

Finally was out at Harbor Freight and picked up a 1x30.

Haven't do anything with it yet, still need to pick up some quality belts, etc...

Want to start off on the right foot, so a couple of questions:

-Plan to use this for regrinds down to about 0.01" and then finish/sharpen by hand. If I stay off the edge, will a drip feed system for wet grinding still be of significant benefit? (Assume it would still improve cutting speed and extend belt life, but I'm not clear on whether damaging the steel is still a concern away from the edge.)

-If I don't set up a water drip, can anyone comment on the effectiveness of the grease sticks sold for lubricating abrasive belts? (Bottom of page, here: [www.supergrit.com])

-For belts I was considering an assortment of ceramic belts. Looking at maybe 36, 60, & 120 grits along with a belt cleaner/eraser and some of the aforementioned grease. Anything else I should look for/consider?

The general plan is to start with some easier to grind steels, 8Cr13MoV, aus-8, 440c and then move up into the more wear resistant stuff. So yes, starting off on inexpensive knives, but I still want to do them right and set myself up for good habits from the start. The problem I see is that hands on instruction is not really an option, so while I have a pretty good idea of what to do from watching videos and reading threads, there is still going to be some room for error and no one standing over my shoulder to tell me when I do something dumb. So any tips, input, etc... are welcome.

-Nate

I was just using mine the other day (developing more bad habits, lol...for some reason I always think it's going to be easy to just regrind something), and I would strongly recommend the water drip. This thing heats up blades in seconds...it's ridiculous.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Always in search of a good choppa'

You will not go wrong with water.

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C Amber
This thing heats up blades in seconds...it's ridiculous.

Agreed.


Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member

Thanks guys. Still curious about the grease, but will go with water to start.

I was at Home Depot this morning anyway, so I picked up a 1/4" od quick release valve. Already had a bunch of tubing and a water bottle laying around, so I slapped this together as a proof of concept



Imagine I should be able to drill a hole through the spark shield and set the tubing to drip right at the top.

-Nate

I took the spark shield (the plastic thing at the top?) off of mine.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Always in search of a good choppa'

Yes, the clear plastic piece. What is the benefit of removing it? (Noticed a lot of people do, but not sure why.) To me it just seemed like an easy spot to set the tubing. The fit is tight so I can set it right on the belt, within a mm or so.



I am not sure about my initial placement, the belt is very effective at flinging the water off onto the shield at speed. I may need to bring it forward so that the water hits the belt near vertical. Not sure if it matters a lot or a little, since once I'm actually grinding water will drip directly onto the blade as well.

-Nate

another idea would be wetting the belt with a paint brush of water, getting it evenly wet, then start the drip then grind
scott

Good tip. It did occur to me that it might be good to start with the belt wet evenly. I'm sure I can scare up an old brush to do that neatly.

Have some belts ordered, probably won't do much else with it until they come in.

-Nate

Friggin sweet



It went really, really well for a first attempt with power. Also worked on an old kitchen knife first, just to get a feel for it. I stumbled across one of Mike Gavac's videos that was about perfect for me to copy on technique. Just tried to go slow and keep it light, stay focused. Told myself it would be really easy and it was! Used 36 & 80 grit belts from Supergrit.

The water cooling is amazing, few sparks, nothing in the air really, (still wore a mask, eye gear, and gloves though.) All the metal and grit just collected in globs that look like wet steel wool, simple clean up with a shop towel.

Only thing I want to change is the valve on my dripline. It doesn't allow much fine control. Everything was really wet, gloves were soaked,which was probably another positive anyway, but I'd like to be able to dial it back a bit.

Here is the tutorial I watched:
[youtu.be]

-Nate

Congratz! That looks like a really clean grind. Nice job Nate


Chumgeyser on Youtube
E-nep throwing Brotherhood. Charter Member