Thread: Vintage Coticule?

Originally Posted by Bart

I think we have to bear in mind that 50 years and longer ago, there were no Nortons, no DMT's, no Shaptons. The bulk of synthetic hones people had access to were much too coarse to be used on razors. Coticules were used as work horses. Loom strops, such as the model that Dovo sells till this day forward, were commonly used with a red paste, to refine the edge further after it came off the coticule. This traditional method of honing is still taught today on various straight razor revival courses in Belgium (and I guess also in other countries).
This use of the coticule is completely different than the on SRP mostly endorsed use of it as a finishing hone, after sharpening on hones that didn't exsist in the "vintage" days.

For the traditional use as a sharpening hone that fits in the realm of the Norton 4K and even of the DMT1200, it is imperative that the coticule in question has good slurry formation abilities. But even that doesn't tell everything. I have used coticules that raised slurry very easily, but still couldn't move hard razor's steel fast enough to be used for serious sharpening of a blunt edge. Those exact same coticules worked just fine on the softer steel of kitchen knifes. The rate at which the slurry darkens while honing is good indication for assessing the rate at which it removes steel.

On the other end of honing, for polishing an already keen edge, the coticule does not need to move steel fast. Slurry is to be avoided so the very softest stones are to be ruled out. After that, we're left with the question how much difference there is between the medium and hard stones and also if the hardness by itself tells the whole story. I don't know.
I have visited different former mining sites, climbed a few fences and took calculated health risks to pick up rocks of raw coticule. Having them cut to strips costed me more than purchasing a few hones at Ardennes (which I have also done, cheers Rob). It took me and my pal Kris countless hours to lap a few of the most promising samples completely flat. Among them are a few glass-hard specimen. At first, I thought they were not doing anything. Although under 40X magnification the steel shows a beautiful polished surface, the edges were always unsatisfactory.
It was not before I bought an outstanding high-grit synthetic hone (the Naniwa Chosera 10K), that I discovered the virtues of those hard coticules. They turn a fantastic edge into a freekingly fantastic edge. But, to reiterate, if you 'd expect those particular samples to improove the given keenness of an edge, then you're going to be dissapointed.

Many coticules offer a good comprise between being avid cutters with slurry and smooth polishers with water. In most cases, I am strongly convinced that the final results are much more limited by the honers skills and not so much by the hones capabilities. In the extremes, some coticules might polish a bit finer and others might cut more rapidly, but it's still the call of the honer how to use it and where to place it in a progression.

Rob, I would very much like to assess coticules for you. It would allow me to gather more empirical data about these historical hones to which I have develloped such a big fondness, and it could help you to finetune your differentiaton system.

Best regards,
Bart.

Let us know what your results are...

Bart, could you contact me through email?
Thanks

In any endeavor in which you engage, there is always an element that will say "Oh, the old stuff was much better and today's stuff is just a shadow of what once was". I've heard this with knife steels, hand tools, fishing lures, bows (archery), anviles, and firearms. It's generally a bunch of crap. Until someone has a laboratory pulverize a vintage coticule and a newly mined coticule and subjects the samples to X-ray diffraction analysis and other tests used by petrologists to determine the quantities of various minerals found in a rock, no one KNOWS anything about the quantity of garnet in coticules.

The only difference in coticules that are "vintage" is that they've been out of the same mine in the same formation 50 or 100 years. There are different grades of coticule and a euro grade that is vintage won't compare to a Select grade that is new. My opinion in this matter comes from my experience with dozens of coticules both new and vintage over the past 6 years of honing and shaving with straight razors.

To Bart,
Actually, there were Nortons 50 years ago. I'm in the middle of reading a book about the Norton Company. They were a pottery in the 1860s and then started adding emery to the clay to make grinding stones and wheels. The 1880s were marked by them and others finally figuring out how to make grinding wheels that would perform predictably and not blow up when spun up by a motor. This was "high tech" back then! Their technological prowess continued to grow through the early 1900s and by that time they had hundreds of abrasive products for all kinds of uses. They started in Worcester, MA where there were also 3 straight razor manufacturers at the time.

The book is "Family Firm to Modern Multi-National, sub-titled "Norton Company, A New England Enterprise", copyright 1985 by Charles W. Cheape, a Harvard Business School professor. I have an extra copy if anybody wants it. $15.

Howard, Thank you so much for your opinion and your great Coticules....Rich

I think we are taking a simple issue and making it complex.

So you have this deposit in the ground of unknown size. So you start mining it. Maybe its a small vein 100 feet long and 10 feet wide. In a few days its gone forever or maybe it's 10 miles square and you can mine it for 100 years. As you go through the deposit there is some variation in the quality of your target mineral or rock but it's only as you come to the end of the deposit that the quality starts to really go downhill. This is an oversimplification but that's how it pretty much goes. Very often once the mine is played out you can go to the mine dumps and pick up some pretty good stuff in very small quantities if your willing to do the work. Heck, with some very valuable deposits they have gone back and reworked the dumps to extract low concentrations of ores that could not have been extracted many years ago.

The age of a deposit has nothing to do with the quality of the stuff you get its just a matter of the size of the deposit and how much has been removed and what is left. Its just that with many mines especially very small ones the best stuff is long gone and what remains is second rate at best but that doesn't have to be the case all the time and of course as you go from mine to mine there are differences in the quality of the product even when they are nearby.

Also consider that many of the very old mines were limited by techniques at the time where great quality still exists however they just couldn't get to it because maybe a vein would plunge too deep. Also, where these mines were family owned and really small scale it was not and still is not economically feasible to continue mining.

I'm not familiar with the coticule mines so I can't comment on the specifics that's best left to Howard and they guys from Belgium.

I didn't think it would cause such a stir, I saw a post on Badger and Blade about how the Vintage Coticule stones were so much better, which IMHO is misleading.

Just to stir the pot a bit here. If I understand correctly, a coticule is a sedimentary rock, meaning it formed from deposits that spent a lot of time building up and compacting. So wouldn't atmospheric conditions, etc. play a roll in the quality of deposits over time? For example volcanic eruptions, flooding, droughts, would all change the quality and variety of deposits. With this in mind couldn't one argue that a "newly" formed cotucule could be of higher quality than an "older" one?

Or is it that when we talk of vintage we are purely referring to the fact that they had first choice of stones a hundred years ago regardless of the age of the stone they were mining. They essentially got to cherry pick the prime stones leaving us today with the "lesser" ones.

For what it's worth I'm just throwing this out there. I don't think that when a coticule was mined has a lot to do with it's quality. Clearly newly quarried stoned have a variety of qualities still.

Originally Posted by JCitron

For example volcanic eruptions, flooding, droughts, would all change the quality and variety of deposits. With this in mind couldn't one argue that a "newly" formed cotucule could be of higher quality than an "older" one?

I'm sorry to say but the answer is no .
Coticule stones were formed like 480 million years ago, so the +/- 40 years between the last 'old' produced stones and the newly quarried stones nowadays is peanuts.

Originally Posted by JCitron

For what it's worth I'm just throwing this out there. I don't think that when a coticule was mined has a lot to do with it's quality. Clearly newly quarried stoned have a variety of qualities still.

In the past there were also a lot of qualities but the general public never saw them because these stones were (and still are) used in the 'local' EU industry. The largest part of our Coticule and BBW stones are used all kinds of industry.

I had in my mind images of sediment layers, but yeah, I guess 480 million years has a way of averaging things out.