Since honing was so onerous, I found some honing plates on e B a y. They are 75x170x1mm. I made a flat plate from some 3/8 aluminum to put the plate on. Much better surface to use rather than my old swaybacked desktop.
Finished the table and mounted it on the belt grinder. Ground two edges of a new 3/8 blank on it. The long first cut is no good. I'm rocking the tool on the grinder. The hone is flat, the tool isn't.
I notice a couple of things are wrong. 1) There's too much gap between the table and the platen. That's fixable. 2) The belt seems to have stretched. Hope there is enough adjustment range in the belt adjuster. 3) With a 120 ceramic grit belt, the tool gets kind of hot. Hot enough that it's hard to hold down flat to the table. I tried 120 rather than the 40 grit, reasoning that it might be easier to hold flat. Of course it takes longer to grind, but the gouges are finer, so the honing might not take as long.
So, I'm making a holder for the lathe tool bit. (A fixture.) This helps in two ways. The first is it's 1" wide rather than 3/8". This should make it easier to keep flat. Also it's longer than a lathe tool bit, so it's easier to hold. 2) The increased mass of the holder will allow a little more grinding before having to cool down. The holder is modeled after a QCTP bit holder. Milled out a slot in a piece of 5/8 x 1" stock. Will add in some 6mm set screws to lock the tool bit in place. Still figuring out how I'm going to hold the piece so I can cut a slot in the corner so the lathe tool bit will go flush to the corner. Will use a slitting saw to make the cut. This is what I have so far.
Cut needs to go in the corner like the figure below.