Thread: Jnat Finisher honing with Water Only

Originally Posted by Lemur

So, are there really good finishers that works with water only?
Won't a softer stone that will self slurry always give of fresh particles to the slurry and thus mess up the honing?

Both these questions could be qualified a little by what you call finishing.

If by finishing you mean 3-5 light strokes or similar then yes there are are really good hard & also slightly less hard finishers that will work with water only.

Also, Iwasaki san does mention using water alone to finish a razor after removing the "false edge " with CrO. Read it again & you will see he says to remove all traces of slurry on the stone for this part of the honing.

Originally Posted by onimaru55

Both these questions could be qualified a little by what you call finishing.

If by finishing you mean 3-5 light strokes or similar then yes there are are really good hard & also slightly less hard finishers that will work with water only.

Also, Iwasaki san does mention using water alone to finish a razor after removing the "false edge " with CrO. Read it again & you will see he says to remove all traces of slurry on the stone for this part of the honing.

Yes I understand "finishing" is a little fuzzy, we all have different standards, from 8K and up.
But when Iwasaki talks about the finishing honing, he says to use a pressure of 165g, that's a lot of pressure.
Which I take as the hone is so fine even with that pressure it will still only remove very very little steel.
As a final step he talks about water only, but then it's also a very light last touch of moving the blade parallel to the edge and only 1-2 mm.
I think that quite far from the honing on water only I've seen others do.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying a light hand won't work for finishing and I'm normally all in on "every which way that works",
but I'm trying to understand more about how they used their stones and at 165g of pressure all I can think of is a slurry broken down to pure lubrication.