Thread: RE: The Potential of Black Arkansas & Translucent as a Razor Finisher

Originally Posted by zib

Mark,

Thanks for starting a new thread. Looking at the stones here, I can see it varies greatly by the Arks the person uses, like any other natural.
It looks like you guys didn't buy your stones off some Arkansas vendor online. When I think Jnats as a final finisher, I'm thinking in the 40k range. I use Nakayama, either Maruka or Maruichi Asagi. They're great finishers. I've never gone to an Arkie after that. I don't see how the edge could get better, but I'm always willing to listen to someone's findings. I think in your case, it has a lot to do with the stones you have. If someone were to go buy an SB, say off Hall's Arkansas stones, I don't think they could get the same results you did, or could they? I'm no Arkie expert, that's for sure.

I'm assuming the SB has to be well used? or well worn. You said thousands of laps? How much work do you need to do on the SB under normal circumstances to surpass the Jnat the edge? I know it varies, so just ballpark?

What would a person need to do to get the edges you speak of. As I said, is it possible with normal SB's bought from an online vendor to surpass Jnat edges or even the Suehiro Gokumyo 20k, etc.....

Very nice stones btw, I really like the Translucent.

The question about vintage vs modern stones is, I suspect, ultimately unanswerable. It's certainly unanswerable by me without another 10 years of honing. There's no obvious reason (i.e. obvious to me) that a recently mined stone of +99% silica should perform less well than a vintage mined stone that will also be of +99% silica (assuming identical Specific Gravity). When graded properly, the stones should be indistinguishable one from the other. Perhaps the difference is in the grading practices among the different mines and between the old mines and the modern ones. Of course I could be wildly wrong here and there might be variables beyond the conditioning of the stone by steel over time of which I'm unaware. Ask me again in 10 years and I might actually have a real answer. So far, I can't really tell the difference in the output from my different arkies based on age or color and I have them from ivory white to that old vintage yellow to gray/black to jet black and their estimated ages of original mining are from 100 years to 40 years old. The big difference I can tell is how finished the surface is relates directly to the comfort of the edge. At least, I "think" it does.

The notion of "improving" an edge is the right way to think of it, imo. I don't know that the arkie gives a finished jnat edge more keenness. To my face, it feels smoother. By the way, it doesn't always do it. I took a bunch of razors in rotation but not freshly honed and gave them all about 200 laps on the arkie on oil one evening and some got better and some didn't. I don't know why. On a freshly honed razor, it always seems to improve the edge, but not on one in rotation. For this reason, I don't use it as a touch up razor. The results have been inconsistent there.

I don't know what it would do after the Suehiro 20k but sure would like to know. Do you have a Trans arkie? If so, put a fresh edge on a razor, from bevel on up to finishing on the SG and let us know. I'd be really curious. I lent one of my SB's to a friend in Asia who uses only synthetics and I believe he finishes on either a Shapton 15k or a Naniwa SS 12k and he believes unambiguously that he is getting better edges.

As you can see, I have more questions than answers, but chasing those answers down is the fun of this whole endeavor. And thank you for the compliment on the stone. I particularly love that old beast.

Originally Posted by 1KnifeGuy4U

MODINE, The coloration on that old stone is interesting. It would take an unbelievable amount of time imo, for oil to change the color of a stone that hard. The Translucents don't drink oil like the Soft stones do. It just floats on the surface for the most part.

With continued use, these stones get a glassy surface which makes them a polishing stone, with almost no metal removal. I have to frequently re-condition the surfaces on my stones so I can use them with Knives.

This past summer my son and I stayed with one of my oldest and closest friends at his beach house in Rhodey. He also rents the one next door to his and that week a friend of his who is a professor of geology stayed there with his wife and grown kids. We had dinner with them every night. I asked him about arkies changing color and while he caveated his answer telling me that wasn't really his field of expertise, he did say that he didn't think the trans arkies changed color because of oil absorption, but rather because of exposure to light. I know this is also true of vintage glass bottles. It's called light irradiation. Bottles and Arkies are made of much the same thing: silica. The softer ones clearly are more absorbent, but I think the trans arkies just change as a result of exposure to light.