Tutorial; Replacing the ATOMA diamond surface pad/plate

First we have to have an old busted plate that needs replacing. This is my shop use 140x ATOMA that's flattened countless amounts of stones over the last couple of years and sharpened a fair amount of knives recently too. This plate isn't dead yet though, it's just too slow for my liking so I'm putting a brand new replacement 140x ATOMA pad on the base.

Here's the old busted pad. Not bad condition considering that I've never once dried it after use.






Here's the kit needed to get the job done. Well I left out some cleaning products but you can get by without seeing that. We have the old busted pad, the new ATOMA replacement pad, a putty knife, and a hammer.





Now we see the back side of the new replacement pad showing the location of the tape strips. Note these locations for the next step.





The way to remove the old pad is to use the putty knife to severe the grip that the sticky tape has between the old pad and base plate. Here you can see how I will do this although you should note that I'm showing that I picked a bad spot to attack the tape, I'm showing that I'm going in at a spot where there is no tape, I'll have to re-position.





Now we see what lies beneath the old busted pad and it doesn't look too bad really. Remember that I said that I never dried this plate off ever and look Mom no rust or damage what-so-ever.





This is the step that I didn't capture - the cleaning. I used WD-40 and some green Scothrbite to remove the residual adhesive and then followed by alcohol to clean up that mess and make sure that we had a nice fresh surface to adhere the replacement pad to.

Here we now have our replacement pad all lined up and ready to go.





I now peel away the little tape backing strip bits (whatever they're called).





Now to adhere the new ATOMA diamond replacement pad to the base plate and we're back in business.




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