Thread: Acetone and norton india

I have a norton India slip stone. As far as I know, I have never used oil on it, but when I went to clean it up after using it (water only) on my 325 DMT, my plate started to get clogged up. I had to use acetone to unclog and clean up my plate. So I concluded that my little slip was oiled at one time or another, and it was concerned by a oily felling on the stone that was never noticed before. I have probably only used it a few times.

So that brought a question. Can I soak it in acetone to maybe get the oil out or am I stuck with this?

P.S. I'm already looking into getting some water stone slips anyway, but I was curious

The Carborundums & most all of the older Nortons, are made that way at the factory,,,, the waterstones by Norton are different.
There is no advantage in removing the oil from them, IMO, & trying, well,,,, you might want to pack a lunch.

If for some reason you feel the need to use a DMT on your oilstones, then use dish soap as you lap or refresh them,,, you can fill a container, bucket with soapy water & lap & refresh under water in the bucket . This helps to keep the oil from sticking to the DMT.

Water is great but is oil that bad? It is what it is and enjoy it for what it is!

Keep in mind that WD-40 also breaks up oil & I use it all the time to flush/clean the swarf from my oil stones. I buy WD-40 by the gallon at Home Depot ,,, much,,, much cheaper that way, & put it in a squirt bottle

Originally Posted by 32t

Water is great but is oil that bad? It is what it is and enjoy it for what it is!

Oil is not really bad at all. I used it for years until I fell in love with water stones. One for cleanliness, and two ease of use because of water being more readily available and cleanup (lapping and flattening included), since I only have one DMT and the swarf clog was hard to remove. But I do like hirlau's idea about the soapy water when lapping.

I've lapped oil soaked carborundoms with water on wet dry sandpaper and loose SiC grit with no problems.

Same, just keep 'em sloppy wet.

I'd use liberal amounts of oil to lap them (not too liberal, just liberal enough so that the swarf is wet and not a clogging paste), and use a separate diamond hone for oilstones to avoid having to clean the oilstone diamond hone all the time.

I don't lap most of my oilstones, but I do lap the ones I expect to cut fast.

Hirlau is right, the synthetic stones are oil filled at the factory by norton. They are oilstones and not waterstones because coarse silicon carbide and coarse aluminum oxide don't come out of a hard matrix stone with water, they just plug. A medium oil like a mineral oil (which is what norton oil is) will keep those stones from clogging because the particles will be moved by the viscous oil. They're better stones for tools and knives than razors, though, at least in my opinion.

I'd rather have an active soft arkansas as a first step if a razor is in really bad shape (active as in lapped and fresh cutting).

I've used oilstones for a while, and long before I got into shaving. I don't like any of them with water, though I know a lot of the vendors of oilstones (the small vendors, especially knife vendors) will put slips of paper with their stones instructing folks to use water. If water was better for general use, the users of the stones 150 years ago would've used it. (I do understand there may be some virtue in shaving of water on the fine stones if you never use oil at all, though they, too, work better and more finely with oil).

I always try to steer guys away from using water on oil stones also. On finer stones anyway the mechanism is often more of a burnishing than cutting one. The only way I ever use water with an oil stone is with a diamond plate slurry. Sometimes that works pretty well.