Thread: To wet or not to wet.

Looked at some photomicrographs online that showed magnified views of various abrasive stones and sheets. It was truly revealing as to why the eschar stone is so respected - tremendous uniformity of grit size. What did surprise me was the difference in the smoothness of the edge produced with the same stone, first wet and then dry. You would think the wet stone would produce a smoother edge, but not so. The dry stone produces a MUCH smoother edge with way less scratches at 200X magnification.
My question is this. The manufacturers of stones recommend soaking and wetting the stone prior to use, but what are the consequences of not doing that and instead using the stone dry to hone the razor?
Thanks for all the help,
Don

The following words are from the knives.com site and are not my words, but I do love the part about the Juranich shaving his beard with an AXE !

John Juranich caused quite a stir when he announced some years ago that as a result of testing he believed that both water and oil stones gave a better edge when used dry. Amazing as this might at first appear his claims are not without some foundation. He tested oilstone and drystone techniques in a meatpacking plant. The study was blind as he was relying on the opinions of the meat cutters themselves who had no idea how any individual knife was sharpened. He explains the events in his book The Razor Edge Book of Sharpening which makes very interesting reading.
Juranich believes that the slurry produced by mixing oil and metal and abrasive particles acted like a grinding paste. He says the effect of having this slurry pass over the edge acted like the earth on a plow tip, rounding it off. On examination under electron microscope the oil sharpened edges were chipped.(F1)
He added emphasis to his point by shaving his generous beard on television, with an axe that he sharpened in a matter of minutes, using the dry sharpening method. Since Juranich's revelations the practise of drystone sharpening has grown in popularity