What is this Chert Nagura of which you speak?
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Take a look at this page in the right hand side you will see a picturre of three arkies read below the picture about the the space and pores and loading .
Novaculite: Used for making stone cutting tools and sharpening metal blades.
Where the hecek is Davew when you need him? How about you guys just drive over to Dans and see what he says about burnishing, he's got a few more years in it than most of us has been alive. Tc
From your link:
(Emphasis mine).Quote:
“Washita Stone” has the appearance of unglazed porcelain, a porosity of several percent and serves as a good stone for coarse sharpening. An extremely fine-grained material known as “Arkansas Stone” has almost NO porosity and is an excellent tool for honing a razor-sharp blade.
Burnishing is not a big deal. One can wait for the stone to burnish on its own through use or do it right away to prep for razor use. Either way, a worn-in stone works best for comfortable shaving razor edges from black or translucent Arks.
I always said there were pores that could be clogged or loaded. I never said how many pores each of the different Arkies had per stone.
An extremely fine-grained material known as “Arkansas Stone” has almost no porosity and is an excellent tool for honing a razor-sharp blade.
This is under the picture of the three Arkansas stones.
The white stone has a coarse texture for initial sharpening, the mottled stone has an intermediate texture for resharpening and the black stone has a very fine texture for honing an ultrasharp edge. The stones are used with a drop of oil that lubricates the sharpening strokes and keeps metal from loading the pore spaces in the stone.
I agree with what you wrote here. All my stone worked well from the start and they still work well even if they have worn (broken in) more than I can tell.
"Burnishing is not a big deal. One can wait for the stone to burnish on its own through use or do it right away to prep for razor use. Either way, a worn-in stone works best for comfortable shaving razor edges from black or translucent Arks."
Yes, I already mentioned this in an earlier post. Where I said that Washita and coarser Ark stones had more porosity which would affect cutting. The black and translucent Arks have such minimal free space in the stone that any porosity is basically irrelevant. There's nothing there to clog. I remember reading the same in an old report by a geologist now that I think about it. I'll see if I can find a link.
It is not just clogging it is like I said before as well . If you buy mud grips for a 4x4 truck and then cut the tread off the tire so that it goes through the mud slow or not at all. You have defeated the whole purpose. It doesn't matter what the stone is if you buy a DMT stone and you take a chisel and knock all the diamonds out of the nickle plating you have altered it's ability to cut well. It seems pointless to me. Your trying to fix something that is not broken or you have purchase the wrong tool for the job. I don't see how it is going to sharpen or hone anything better.
Hahaha! Funny you mention that, the first thing I did with my DMT was run a screw driver over it 100 passes or so to knock off all the high sitting diamonds.
Well, hopefully the lot of hones will be in tomorrow so I can check this puppy out!
Well it's just a trade-off really. One must decide what one wants to do with the stone and prep it accordingly. By knocking down those microscopic high points you lose cutting speed for sure - no argument there. But you also get a more comfortable shave. Leaving the high points (IOW, not burnishing the stone) gives you better cutting speed, but a less comfortable shave. I keep my black and translucent Arks prepped with one side burnished and the other lapped with 320 SiC loose grit - it's the best of both worlds IMO. And really, as the stones are used more and more, if the coarse sides don't get periodically refreshed with 320 SiC, they lose massive amounts of cutting speed quite rapidly, so it happens whether the stones are burnished intentionally or not.
Well, the jury is in on the big rock:
Attachment 238344
225 lumen flash light near the edge, you can see light about a third of an inch through the rock. She's translucent! Considering it came with a 5"x2" black and a lapping plate for less than 90 bucks after shipping, I am a happy camper!
Can anyone ID this thing?
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The coloring and banding had me thinking it was a Washita, but it feels glassy and smooth in my hand. Now I'm not sure what to make of it.
Slightly better pictures:
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After simple green bath and a little scouring pad action:
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Ready for surface prep and side beveling.
Great looking stones Marshal, I vote Washita and a very good one at that.
EKretz and Alien Edge, I believe you are Both right in your thinking, so there, that ends the battle. :dropjaw: :beer1:
Marshal, the big one is definitely a good example of a "black translucent" and I'd guess the banded one is probably a hard or soft Ark.
As far as the "battle" goes, I just consider it a discussion. And that is what discussion forums are for, isn't it? Different viewpoints ought to be able to be aired and discussed without conflict - and I don't think AE and I were at each other's throats at all - merely discussing our varied thoughts. And I thank him for the discussion, no less! :beer1:
I'm not quite sure I'm believing what I'm seeing here. So I busted out my Soft and Hard Arkansas stones. Both of these have pores that are readily visible to the naked eye, but I checked them out under my 60X loupe anyway and spent a few moments just kinda feeling them out. Then I switched over to that banded stone. WAY smoother than either of them, and pores only visible at 60x magnification. So I picked up my black and translucent and did the same thing. Well, this banded hone felt suspiciously similar to my translucent. Check this out:
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Light doesn't penetrate nearly as far as it does the large grey translucent stone, but you can still see it coming through. For comparison, the Soft and Hard Arkansas stones show what we would expect, 0 light transmission:
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I think that may actually be a 6" x 2" x 1" translucent stone.
It may well be. I've never seen a translucent Ark so prominently banded before, pretty cool.
Nice rocks Marshal!
Sometimes you get lucky... Looks like you hit the jackpot right there. Nice stones.
Talking about things and their differences I like to think of as debating . It can be educational for me and disastrous. Having to pull out a lot of stones to look at them under the kitchen light brought the number of stones to my wife's attention. Not good ! Now I can only hope she has to debate shoes sometime in the future. :tameshigiri:
So, I was in the middle of lapping the smaller stones (Jesus Christ these things are hard!), and taking pictures of the lapping/burnishing process. One side of that little black rock was very flat and smooth, and it didn't really need flattening - but when it came out of the water I saw something that really caught my attention:
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At first I was thinking that was some sort of metallic inclusion, but then I started thinking about a banded black/translucent hybrid that I believe Euclid showed a picture of and that got the gears turning. So I broke out my trusty Flashlight to see if there were bit of translucent in that rock:
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The light doesn't penetrate very far - only perhaps 1/8 or 3/16 of an inch, but that looks like translucent number 3 to my eyes.
It seems like I've spent the better part of an hour or 2 every day trying to get these things into fighting shape. Flattening them? Virtually impossible. Sand paper did nothing, and the DMT did...well, more than nothing. But not much more. I got the little black stone flat with them, but less than halfway through the banded hone I tapped out. Out of desperation I used one of the diamond plates to build up a diamond slurry on my Norton lapping stone - yes you read that right - and tried that out. Finally some progress! It actually worked, and cut better than the DMT. The only downside was stopping to re-flatten/build slurry every 80 laps or so.
Then it was time to polish. I thought I would start with the smallest, because in theory it should be easiest. Well, the theory was wrong. I burned through 3 sheets of 400 grit sand paper, and didn't make a dent in the scratches left behind from the diamond plates. I thought about Solitarysoldier mentioning that he had to be careful with the coticule on his soft Ark lest he burnish it and that got the gears turning. So I built up a coticule slurry on my PHIG and worked that mercilessly. No joy there either. Back to the sand paper to work the stone while I pondered my next move. I noticed that not only did the Norton cut the banded stone faster, it also didn't leave any scratches behind. So it went back to the Norton lapping stone, and sure as sunlight brings the dawn it was able to clean up the DMT scratches. Newfound respect for the lowly Norton lapping stone - or what's left of him. The backside is all chewed up from chamfering and rolling the edges and I'm sure the working surface is half as thick as it once was.
So considering 400 grit sandpaper effectively did nothing, there was no point in trying the usual 600/1000/2000 progression. The million dollar question - what the heck do I do now? The solution - my old worn out Norton combination hones. I tried out the 1000, and you could tell by the translucent white slurry that most of the mud I built up came from the Arkansas. So I progressed through the 8K because...well it isn't going to hurt a worn out stone anyway. I think the 8k was the most frivolous of the lineup, nothing but yellow mud everywhere. But the 1K and 4K showed the same translucent white slurry so I'm fairly sure they did what I needed them to.
Now if I can just decide what to do with the large translucent I'll be in good shape. I've got about 10 inches in the center of it flattened and fairly polished, but I'm not entirely sure I'm dedicated enough to take it all the way home. Very tempted to just say to heck with it and use it as is.
You are a trooper Marshal. Lapping arkansas stones isn't fun. I can't imagine doing a massive Ark. I would maybe try loose grit on a sheet of glass for the big fattie. Euclid I think is a big pro-loose grit guy who I got the idea from.
I also have one of these https://m.canadiantire.ca/#/products...559&quantity=1
For when a stone just won't respond to anything...
Drywall sanding mesh.
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If you get the correct type you will have a 5 meter length that you can wrap over a paving slab. I did most of my naturals this way when I was playing with Charnley and diorite from uncut stone.
Loose Silicone carbide grit also works really fast. If you use a baking sheet to keep it all in and just keep adding grit as it breaks down.
The trick is getting enough space to get a decent throw on the rock. Once you get a good throw and you can get some bodyweight into it the stone will flatten very fast and with far less effort.
Yeah, I'm not enjoying this as much as I thought I would lol. And the big one is the worst of them all. Both sides are - were - high in the center to the point I wouldn't even use it on a pocket knife. At least 1 side has some flat usable space now.
I might have to look into that sanding mesh or loose grit depending on how things go with the large stone. The other 2 just need a little burnishing and they'll be good to go.
15-20 minutes with lose 60 silicon carbide, on a cement floor, with a steel cookie sheet and your body weight as said, will get you to flat.
The rest of the grits go quickly.
Lose Silicon Carbide will eat the glass plate, it is how they polish glass lenses.
Won't it also eat a cookie sheet? I would imagine steel to be easier to abrade.
It will eat anything after enough time. This is why it's important to distribute the wear as evenly as possible. Spend a little extra time doing circles around the outside of the perimeter - the wear is almost universally fastest in the center due to the fact that it's crossed more than the perimeter. Best thing to do if you have a very far out of flat situation is to get full contact first, then switch to a good flat piece of granite tile or whatever for the final flattening with slightly finer grit. Or a diamond plate - but on a very hard stone take care to only use the diamond plate for the last little bit or it will be severely slowed down. They can even go a bit out of flat if too much work is done on a severely dished stone.
Strangely enough both sides of this are convex, not cocave. Opposite of what I think of when I see the word dished. I think it's too late for both of the diamond plates I've got, my DMT has probably seen too many hard naturals and I think the one that came in the lot has seen the same abuse. Both are quite slow now, at least when it comes to abrading an Arkansas stone. They're probably still adequate for softer things and restoration work.
I had one that was filled with red, pink and gray lines. It looked really nice, and I should've probably kept it. There was someone on ebay a couple of years ago for a very short period of time, someone selling a whole glom of multi-colored hard stones (hard in the sense of the old hard - like 2.6SG with translucence). Mine got lost in the shuffle of having too many ark stones and I sold it - as uncommon as they were, I wish I would've kept it. I sold it to someone on here in the classifieds, IIRC, for about the same as it cost - $90 for 2x8x1 - a bargain.
This isn't true. The novaculite is about the same hardness as iron carbides, maybe slightly softer. The new stones often have mill marks on them, and since the stone matrix is all the same material, if that exposes a large sharp edge, the stones cut faster and more coarsely than a single particle. A medium oil will not allow anything but a crystolon stone to load (and even then, not much - flush with oil and the loading comes out).
The break-in of a new stone either makes the mill marks smaller or dulls their blunt edges (people progressively sanding to a very fine finish will remove them entirely). It's necessary only to blunt them.
If a newbie bought a new "trans black" from naturalwhetstone, they'd find it cutting at first as fast as a washita stone.
Older stones are always broken in, and stones well used are broken in. Finishing a razor on a brand new ark stone that was cut with a diamond saw and then lapped with coarse silica on a rotary lap or something else isn't a great idea.
Soft and hard were it originally. Hard was a black or a translucent stone (there was no need to state that a light colored hard was a translucent stone because there weren't main line catalog "hard" stones that weren't).
Catalog stones were:
* Soft arkansas (offered as a low cost alternative to washita)
* Washita of various grades
* Hard
The tweener stones that have SG of about 2.4 or 2.5 probably would've been discarded back then. Now they're marketed as "hard", but they will cut finely, too, if never scuffed up again after new - just not poreless bright polish fine.
I've shaved off of a washita stone a few times, there's a lot of range for the stones depending on how they're used, and now that we have diamond hones, we can make a 2.7SG trans cut faster than a 2.1 SG coarse/soft washita that isn't scuffed.