DMT Dia-paste

DMT Diapaste

These finest of diamond abrasives are more uniform in grain size and last longer than other grinding compounds. For achieving the highest possible polish on the carving tools, chisels or plane irons you use to make finishing cuts, DMT DiaPaste is an oil-soluble base loaded with industrial monocrystalline diamonds like those used on DMT’s diamond stones—only much finer.

Use DiaPaste once your tool has been honed and/or flattened through the equivalent of a 9 micron diamond stone—roughly 800-grit sandpaper or a 1200-grit Japanese waterstone. Charge a leather, wood, or iron substrate with a small quantity of DiaPaste. Label the substrate with the micron size to avoid mixing grits (the unused paste is color-coded, but they all turn grey with use), and work your way through 6, 3, and finally 1 micron honing.

For an approximate comparison, a 6000-grit Japanese waterstone has 2 micron particles, and an 8000-grit stone has 1.2 micron particles, though of course they’re not diamond. Note that soft substrates like leather will tend to “dub over” the cutting edge when the compressed strop material rebounds as it’s released at the trailing edge of the blade being honed.Close-grained hardwood like maple makes an excellent polishing block for plane irons and chisels.

2-gram syringe.