Thread: What do you use on a hard black slate hone? Water or honing oil.

No guess where it came from. It was bought at a flea market in Indiana from the same place I got my hindostan hone. Think I paid around $5.00 for it. To be honest I had misplaced it for a couple of years & just found it.

Slawman

Originally Posted by Slawman

No guess where it came from. It was bought at a flea market in Indiana from the same place I got my hindostan hone. Think I paid around $5.00 for it. To be honest I had misplaced it for a couple of years & just found it.

Slawman

If I were in East Central Illinois, I'd be pretty excited about a Hindostan stone, if only to keep things somewhat close by, regionally-speaking. Might be interesting to do a little research on slates in Indiana and a little further afield to see if they were historically used for honing there. There was a guy on the forums a while back using some black slate he'd dug up in Kentucky, claiming that it was a decent finisher, etc., etc.

When you first purchased it, where there any indications that it was used with oil? And beyond the seller, was it from the same source as the Hindostan? If so, it might be interesting to try a Hindostan > slate progression to see what that yields.

The guy I bought both stones from had no clue about them. Said he got them at an auction near Bloomington Indiana. There is a lot of slate in Indiana & also shale. There is a lot of coal mined there so you see shale & slate in the tailings pile at times.