Thread: Which Jnat will give me the sharpest edge?

After thinking that I overcame my HAD, and sold my best stones, I ended up reading about Jnats on the Jnat club thread. And that darned HAD kicked back!
So, I searched for them, stones, sellers, types, articles, and learned from members here (Alex, JimR, Maksim, amongst others), that, western stones like nakayama, ozuku, shobu, were good, and, the wakasa and maybe maruoyama that are not from somewhere near Tōkyō, are good for razors, and basically, any stone from a mine that's in it's final years, where stones are extracted from as deep as possible are good from razors.
The slurry stones are very useful, and, experience on how to use them is even more useful.
And, I ended buying one shobu, and one ozuku, big sized, pure stones. I chose a very hard ozuku kiita over a very hard nakayama asagi, although both looked good, I hope I chose right.
I've been wondering if Jnats can give better shaves than European stones. I'll have time to test them and see for myself.

Anyway, the smooth vs sharp, everyone has his own preferences. CrOx vs Diamond. There is no definite answer.
Anyone interested, I can give you updates on the stones.

I too am in the middle of experimenting with a few naturals, only after what I feel is some reasonable success with synthetics. The trouble for the average shaver is that unless you're turning over large quantities of razors, you're really stuck with playing with what you've got. But that's ok in a sense, cause you really only care about getting the best edge from those particular razors - everything else doesn't really matter.
So to that end, I'll finish a particular razor in rotation on my naniwa 12k, which provides a very nice shave, then go back to a natural to see how it compares. I try to stick with the same razor for that test to make sure I'm getting apples to apples.

So, instead of going through 100 razors to dial in a process on a natural like Glen says, I'm going to have to do 5 razors 20 times each (at least, obviously). That may not give the breadth of learning of every type of razor, but that's ok if you get good edges off what you got.
So what's all this rambling about? I think really the only option is to fork over the money for a natural that you are interested in and work it for as long as it takes to convince yourself it's either good or bad. Good, then keep it, bad, then sell it and hopefully get something very near what you paid...

Apart from the money you have to shell out to try different hones, I really love this side of SR shaving. I would definitely say I'm more interested in chasing edges than chasing razors. It's a good feeling to know exactly what a particular razor in the rotation needs to get that sublime edge.