Thread: Ebay Gamble

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.



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.

Originally Posted by S0LITARYS0LDIER

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...

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.

Originally Posted by eKretz

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

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.

Originally Posted by AlienEdge

Mother nature took 350 million years to produce your Arkie and she did it well. It is 99% silica there is nothing better. But It is a different animal. I keep reading people wanting to burnish the Arkie that is a bad idea. I the old days oil was use to keep the arkie from loading up. Let me repeat that one "loading up the stone" There is no such thing as burnishing an arkie . If you use a chisel or and ax on it until it is smooth you only "loaded the stone" This is like buying mud grips for a 4x4 truck and then cutting the tread off the tires and wondering why it goes trough the mud slow or not at all. It is a myth burnishing the Arkansas .

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.

Originally Posted by sidmind

A few years ago, there were far fewer classifications, me thinks many of the ones we have today are made up by sellers of recent times.
Not that the more recent classifications are not cool and all, its just my opinion after owning them all that few are different in usage.

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.