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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:

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Originally Posted by eKretz

It may well be. I've never seen a translucent Ark so prominently banded before, pretty cool.

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I have. Remember that pink trans with swirls the guy sent me to lap at the other place? It looked very similar to that. Nice stones.

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Originally Posted by Dcaddo1

I have. Remember that pink trans with swirls the guy sent me to lap at the other place? It looked very similar to that. Nice stones.

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This one. It looks a little different than I remembered.

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Originally Posted by Marshal

This is my suspicion as well. I vaguely remember back when the grades were: soft, Hard, and Black. I can only imagine Translucent isn't new. But I would figure most of these variations of 'black' stones are all in the same general category - finishers.

Like Sid said, the slurry isn't material from the Arkansas itself - it comes from a softer stone, and that is what will be doing the work. And the purpose would be to make your hard/finishing stone behave like a lower grade stone. Example A:

http://straightrazorpalace.com/honin...lurry-ark.html

Now the original poster of that thread used slurry from a coticule to speed up bevel setting and what not on his soft Arkansas hone with video of the process. Elsewhere in the thread you'll see where another member used the same method to do a one stone progression on his Black Arkansas with good results. As for me, I don't have much experience with slurry but I do enjoy playing with it. And there is no harm trying it out on an Arkansas hone provided you don't make a mistake and slurry up your burnished side.

I have a simple solution for that too. On all of my stones the edges of the burnished side are rounded. On the rough side I use for slurry experiments, the edges are beveled. Makes for a quick easy visual so I don't wreck the 'good' side by mistake.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUAgJcD7QHo

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Originally Posted by Dcaddo1

This one. It looks a little different than I remembered.

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Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Marshal's is still more defined in its banding though I think. Both very nice stones indeed.

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:

Attachment 238534

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:

Attachment 238535

Attachment 238537

Attachment 238538

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.

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Originally Posted by Marshal

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:

Attachment 238534

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:

Attachment 238535

Attachment 238537

Attachment 238538

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.

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Holy Shnikies!

Nice tranny!

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.