Thread: Slurry Grit?

Originally Posted by kevint

if you have a diamond lapping plate- there is your nagura

yes. at 12k you can make a diamond nagura slurry from the 12k's own particles with a fine enough diamond plate. a thing of beauty on a natural stone. a 1000grit or finer diamond is ok, more coarse than that and you'll just shred your 12k so don't even think it.

a more aggressive slurry is the same thing you loose by watering down

Ark are pretty tough, try lapping one. They are very unlikely to form a slurry, so most likely you have near pure chinastone in your milk.

Arkansas stones are not all the same as far as hardness is concerned. It has been my experience that the lower grit hones are softer than the higher grit ones. I'm guessing that you have a surgical arkansas? It should be harder than your chinese 12k. At least mine is. So, more of your slurry should have come from the chinese 12k. But, that's not to say that none of the slurry came from the arkansas stone.

Wa****a stones are softer than the surgical ones. I have a soft arkansas as well and it seems to be softer than the surgical, and a much lower grit, too, but the chinese 12k clogs it up with its darker slurry when I rub them together. My chinese 12k is a very dark gray when wet. I have seen some for sale that are more of a blue color. There is some variance in natural stones, so this may not apply to your hones.

Let me try and rephrase this as not to anger the ever watching Mods.....
I would suggest you keep the slurry the same as the host stone. Sometimes, it is fun to experiment, but I only do this with Coticules and BBW's. I will mix the slurries on those hones only. ON a chinese 12k, I would use a chinese 12k slurry stone. I know for a fact that they sell them on here on the classifieds.....I feel that mixing slurries on two different type hones is not a good thing. It may result in uneven honing. You'll have two types of honing materail on the hone, not one super hybrid. The don't mix, period. They remain seperate, molecularly speaking. so, you'll have 12k slurry and 3.5k slurry, resulting in what OS said, "a contaminated mess"
IMHO.....

Doesn't someone on the boards chop up the 12k stones and sell them as slurries? I think theres some in the classifieds.

Here ya go. Did the search for you.
Chinese 12K Slurry Stones - Straight Razor Place Classifieds

I recently bought a small carborendum stone advertsied as a travel razor hone, which wasn't. But I did use it to tidy up my 12k (I didn't know the surface had gone too smooth until I roughed it up a touch, with GENTLE strokes so as not to scratch) and it eats into the thing.

I managed to smooth out all the surfaces and create slurry very easily that worked well on the razor, but it was my first time with slurry so I'm no pro.

I will keep it for that purpose since it seems much harder than the 12k, but when I get back home i will probably take the angle grinder to the 12k and cut a small slurry stone off the end, maybe even try splitting the thing down the middle to get 2 flat stones, better to travel with.

In short, a good hard low grit stone will do the job in some cases but better you use a matching stone for slurry if you can.

I've experimented with the Norton synthetic nagura. I like using it on waterstones. I think it may be designed so the slurry it produces is hard enough to abrade the waterstone matrix so as to refresh the cutting grit, but soft enough to not have a measurable effect on the blade steel. I don't know if that is true, but I plan to test this in the future.