Thread: Help with choosing a finishing stone

Audiophiles are an entirely different subject.

We're talking about stones that are used by people in varying fields of interest with entirely different goals in mind, but still come to the same conclusions about how those stones interact with various types of steel.

If the top woodworkers in the world, the most renouned knife sharpeners, professional chefs, and "experienced" straight razor honers all agree that stones from a given geographic area and geological layer have X or Y abrasive qualities, it's pretty safe to assume that they are not making it up, or being decieved by fanciful whims and wishful thinking.

Besides that, you can't make these kinds of claims without having tried the items in question for yourself. Not to be elitist or anything, but it's common sense that I could never judge whether an experienced coffee taster can trully discern the specific plantation in the specific country and region of growth of the coffee he is tasting, not to mention the factors of amount of roast that the beans had and how long they ago they may have been roasted in combination with how fine the grind was and the time that the coffee took to brew (if we're talking espresso). I could just never make that distinction until I amass a comparable repertoir.

And vice versa; that same coffee connoisseur would likely scoff at me for telling him that I think a certain blade in question is between RC 61 and 63 in hardness, made of low alloy carbon steel of minimum X percentage of carbon, and that Y stone would likely be more suited than Z stone because the abrasive qualities of Y will lessen the chance of microchipping while slowly working up to an edge that will be slightly rounded because of the slight slurry that will form during the honing process.


Furthermore, what do any of us have to gain by playing into this conspiracy?