Thread: Natural Combo Ozuku Asagi Stone

Hello Gents,

I am here today to show you one of my recent acquisitions; I bought this Ozuku Asagi from a fellow SRP member he was nice enough to sell this super unique stone to me… once I saw the pictures I knew that I HAD to get it. As you can see, it is a natural combination stone, double sided with two tones.








Fascinating stuff!!!



The seller told me that this hone is finer than an Escher hone, and challenged me that if got a finer stone he will return my money back. Well, I HAD the results below


The Star of the show





I have chosen well-known razor for this challenge, good old Henckels Inox Steel.




Honing Progression:



a. Preparing the edge:

The razor was already in a good, so I have degraded the edge using a vintage coticule, and here is the edge after degrading. Every time I hone the razor on a stone, I will return to this coticule degrade the edge again and verify it under the microscope until I feel that the edge similar to the below baseline picture.







b. Finishing:
I will use water only no slurry at all, I believe this helps to revel the capabilities of the stone without interfering. Since there is no slurry, I used circular strokes about 20 for each side and finished with 60 x strokes, I used a hint of pressure on the circles and weight of the blade only for the x strokes.

Note: these are the results of my hands/skills; I know that there are many variables in the process, which I tried to narrow down as possible; I am only sharing my experiment, I hope that the discussion will focus more on the results than other thing…


1. Ozuku Asagi: The Yellow side, it’s a hair softer that the Green/Blue side, I concluded this after being able to produce a slurry using Translucent Arkansas stone, while I couldn’t produce any tiny bit of slurry on the Green/Blue




2. Ozuku Asagi: The Green/Blue Side, it is finer as it looks to me.




3. BG Esher:


It looks finer than a BG Escher, but none are as fine as the below:

4. Vintage Translusent Arkansas:



However I do not want to return the stone, neither I am getting my money back I feel guilty enough that nobody is enjoying this but me

Finally, from earlier playing with these hones I am sure that I can drive the performance of the hones by using slurry, but I preferred using the water to avoid creating a coarser surface using diamond plate, since all of my stones are polished.

Here is a bonus picture of a Rouge Du Salm edge:
Progression: slurry to clear water, as you can see its way finer than the vintage Coticule




sorry for the low quality photos.

Regards,