Thread: Vintage Coticule?

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.