Thread: Found another hone. Need help

This time I found a natural stone. This one is exciting in these sense that it came from the same place/lot of stuff that yielded my 1790s stubtail awhile back. Hone was bought in appalling shape. It looked like someone mistook it for a piece of cheese and kept trying to cut through it at right angles to itself. I picked the side with the most uniform abuse and have been lapping it. I am not having a terribly hard time. I think in about two hours I will have a level, uniform surface. No oil whatsoever was in this. Stone is incredibly slick. On the back end I am not lapping, there is a large green blotch of stone. Slanted saw marks on both ends. Stone is greenish blue with some green jello colored blobs mixed in. Have included photos of what the stone is giving off during lapping. Has been a painless process so far. Been using 220 to do the heavy lifting of getting gouges out.

This was my start point for the first photo.

This hone is absolutely littered with irregular green blotches of all sizes throughout. More than the camera is successfully showing. I finished lapping it with some worn down 2000 grit on a very light slurry off the stone. It really brought out the fine details. It feels phenomenally fine. Took 5ish hours total to lap from a state similar to the gash-ridden non-working side. I wouldn't say it was back breaking to lap though. Vosgiennes seems to be the word on this.

after looking at all those nice pictures of how you brought the stone back to life I have to say I still don't know what the color is, is it gray, purple, green? I'm not the one capable of teling you what kind it is, the only thing that sprong to my mind was belgium blue but that seems verry unlikely whit those green spots, the only thing I can tell you with certainty is that it look prety to me, that's all

Purple or Purplish slurry is usually a dead give away that it's a BBW or Belgian Blue Whetstone. In some of the pics, it certainly does look like one.

Looks similar to mine here, it should be a very nice finisher, post 8K stone. The slurry on mine looks more brownish, but you seem to have more green spots.

They are actually a pretty soft stone. I raise a thin slurry with a 1200 DMT and 2-3 drops of Smith’s Honing Solution thin the slurry to clear water and Smith. You can shave off the stone.

Equal to or better than an Escher edge.

Nice find.

As been already posted at B&B it seems to be a Vosges / Vosgian stone...to agree with Euclid440...

Definately no BBW (Belgian Blue or Rouge Du Salm)...

Entirely possible that its a fine slate. I have seen similar, though I can t be certain without holding it in hand.