Thread: llyn melynllyn

My knowledge is from personally visiting the locations as well as Inigo Jones factory which used to be subcontracted to make the hones which are of very speciffic size. Those who had few of the originals in hand will recognise that the sizing is odd. I am not sure how it is over the pond but Welsh mountains are relatively small and made out of many different materials which can be very close together.
Question which I asked was about the originality of the hone as regarding recognised Brand name. This brand carries with it certain characteristics. I am not questioning quality of the hone. From the description is sounds like the hone has very simmilar, the same or perhaps even better characteristics as known Brand name (result). To be 100 percent certain you would have to go into much more forensic research. Why they chose to call the brand Yellow Lake is a question which I can not answer.
BTW next time you buying Escher hone (And paying much more than for Thuri) they do come from the same Thuringia region and they can have very same characteristics. How would you call them?
Perhaps Hatzicho will tell you what other hones were sourced from Thuringia region.
With your theory we would not have Llyn Idwal hone quarry of which is positioned half way ish between Bethesda and YL mine and there are other hone quaries mines in the same mountain range just few miles within each other.
Once you will see honemakers how they make those hones from the beginning to the end you will have more understanding.
And that is end to my researcher/user/collectors rant.
Enjoy those natural hones with their personalised characteristics/ beauty which the natural hone users love.

Man, I'm kinda dejected. After this thread I got an interest in the vintage yellow lakes bUT i was sure id never swe one. What do I see on Ebay late last night? A vintage Salmen's Yellow Lake hone - and while I was busy at work today someone outbid me by £.50.

Oh well. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to see another in the wild somewhere.

Originally Posted by dmnc

But surely the branded ones were from the region the name suggests, if the ones from aj are gathered from the same area, I would say he has every right to call them LM stones. Similar to thuringians, a stone from the region is still a thuringian even if it's not an escher. Think the confus on arises in this case purely because the brand name was the area name too. My thoughts.

I disagree.

I have never been to the Ardennes or Thuringia or even Arkansas. I am willing to bet that I could drive down to Arkansas and dig up a piece of rock that looks and performs nothing like the stuff we use for hones. Not every rock from Arkansas qualifies as an Arkansas stone and not every rock around the Ardennes mine in Belgium is a coticule. The same is true for Thuringia.

AJ can get rocks from the same location, but that does not mean that those rocks share the same characteristics as the names he has usurped.

Well, that's where the contention comes in. It's not like the only rocks to bear the Lynn Melynllyn name prior to AJ's came solely from the mine by the lake itself. Various mines in the region have produced hones sold under the name Lynn Melynllyn/yellow lake, and AJ's stones are reportedly comparable in performance to the vintage hones bearing the same name.

I would argue that if you drive to the nearest mountain to the Ouachita and dig up a piece of Novaculite that performs like the Novaculite we're familiar with, you'd be well within your rights to call it an Arkansas stone.

Point is that none of the hones came out of the Yellow Lake Mine as it is of different kind of rock.
Second point is that the area of the Yellow Lake is about 2 square miles and the location where the new material is from is completely out of area. Ther mine is in Carnedds Range of snowdonia Mountains. The quary near Bethesda is in Glyders Range. That would be like finding the quarry on LLeyn penninsula which suppose to have translucent quality novaculite deposit, makin few hones from it and calling it Translucent Arkansas.

Originally Posted by Marshal

I would argue that if you drive to the nearest mountain to the Ouachita and dig up a piece of Novaculite that performs like the Novaculite we're familiar with, you'd be well within your rights to call it an Arkansas stone.

Your way off base in using Arkansas Stone as the argument, as Arkansas stones are not a brand, it is just a general grouping of any Novaculite stone from Arkansas, including crappy ones that suck. Arkansas stones can be soft, hard, medium, Washita, black surgical, white translucent, black translucent, and so on.

I do know a thing or two about Arkansas stones as I have been to the mines and purchased second tier stones in bulk ( currently I have hundreds, I also purchased one of their lapping machines a few years back, so I could flatten, prep, and sell them on Ebay, my stones were all purchased with imperfections, and I had to purchase about 700 stones to make it worth their time for me to pilfer through the boxes, these stones could not be sold to Norton and other name brands, in fact my vender is the mine that all Nortons come from, and all Nortons are top tier stones.

Most of my Arkansas stones will work just as well as a Norton, but not look as good, or at least some don't until I lap the heck out of them if I possible, some others I got them home and found large inclusion that I didn't see before the lapping, so I have to cut those down to pocket stones or take a hammer to. That was just the risk in buying the rejects. but for the most part I love my rejects as the colors are beautiful, I am getting side tracked here.

The point is Norton would be similar to a Thurigan or Yellow Lake, as the mine hand selects only the finest stones to sell to Norton, your entire argument is like trying to call all Arkansas stones a Norton, you would not do that would you??? Then you can't call AJ's by their vintage counterparts, and you can't call a Thurigan an Esher.

Well, considering the brand is " Salmen's." The box says, "Original Yellow Lake Brand Natural Oilstone." No, calling it a Lynn Melynllyn is nothing like trying to call any Arkansas stone a Norton. It's like calling a hone quality piece of Welsh slate a Lynn Melynllyn, which is like calling a hone quality piece of Novaculite an Arkansas stone. Are your stones not Arkansas stones because they didn't come from Norton/Dan's/Woodcraft supply store?

Would a piece of Novaculite be any less an Arkansas stone if it were mined in Japan, but had the form and function of a translucent or true black Arkansas hone?

Hell, AJ isnt even calling his the same thing as Salmen's called theirs, so I'm not entirely sure why you're both so dead set against what he's decided to call his slate hones. They're his rocks, he's not being disengenuous about what they are or where they come from, and he clearly isn't using a trademarked brand or he'd be in court over it by now.

Perhaps once you get to learn a bit about history of those hones and start respecting the work of people behind those names you will understand. That brand existed long before Salmen's.
But with this approach you could get lucky. There supose to be in N. Wales a source for translucent quality novaculite hone material too. Looking forward to those Arkies.