Thread: Franz Swaty restoration.

I recently received a Franz Swaty that in bought in eBay fir $10. It has some cracks along the borders. Otherwise, the stone looks good.

First question: Should i lap the whole stone until the cracks are gone or should i bevel the borders?

Second: What should I use to lap and/or bevel?

Third: If I lap the stone with 400 grit on one side, and 1500 grit on the other, will there be a difference in performance from side to side?


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Pics would help.

If by cracks at the edge, you mean little chips that I commonly see on them, I would maybe take a round pen/pencil and some sandpaper and wrap some sand paper around it to soften those up. Other than that I left the edges of mine the way they were.

My suggestion is try the hone before lapping it. If it makes a fine finish, you might be saving yourself a lot of elbow grease lapping, polishing, and burnishing a hard piece of ceramic. Made that mistake once, not eager to repeat it.

I'm fairly sure you can calibrate the hone to some degree, prep one surface one way the other another, and get 2 different results. Some of them are advertised as coming that way from the factory (back side should be more coarse than the face w/ the stamp IIRC). Again, try it out to see how it works.

I lapped, polished, and burnished the back side of mine cause it was scratched all to Hell. I will say this, even with both sides being fine that thing can make a blade scary sharp with a quickness.

I don't think you can change the coarseness of the hone on each side. I believe they pour the mix into a mold and fire it for a few days at a very high temperature to make the hone. Also they seem to pride them self on the fact that the hone is uniform through out. So if you take off a 1000 th of inch or a sixteenth of an inch you still get the same original mix.

You want to do as LITTLE as possible to make the hone usable

There was a Factory finish that was most likely buffed in, try and keep that

If you must Lap it you need to take it back up to at least 1000 grit, I did quite a few back in the day and used an Arkie for a final finish on them

Yep, it's gotta be smoooooth to do its job right. And yes, leaving one side lapped coarser will cause that side to cut coarser/faster. This is true too for any very hard hone that doesn't give up much if any auto-slurry/abrasive particles. The actual abrasive particles in most barber hones are pretty large. The polishing or glazing of the barber hone basically levels these out with the binder and lets them cut like finer particles - that is to say, they cut much shallower scratches, producing a finer finish.

IIRC Todd S. imaged a Swaty with his SEM and found that the abrasive particles present in the hone were equivalent in size to those from a 600ish grit synthetic hone.

I took a picture of my Franz Swaty hone for anyone that does not own one to see what they look like. I do not believe you can change the grit of this hone. You can damage the surface and make it appear rough like a hockey puck that has been through two seasons, but I don't think that changes the grit.

Originally Posted by AlienEdge

I took a picture of my Franz Swaty hone for anyone that does not own one to see what they look like. I do not believe you can change the grit of this hone. You can damage the surface and make it appear rough like a hockey puck that has been through two seasons, but I don't think that changes the grit.

Didn't you post this picture...?



Right there at the bottom right it says in the factory information that the side with the stamp is finished finer than the back side. Clearly there's a way, but the exact details I'm sure are gone along with the original manufacturer.

I'm interested in restoring barber hones as well. I have a few in question but not confident I can replicate the factory finish at home. I'll have to go through them and get some pictures to maybe add here. I know I have a swaty that appears unused but the finish is duller than I would expect compared to other swatys I have that were obviously used and well burnished almost "glassy".

Originally Posted by Marshal

Didn't you post this picture...?



Right there at the bottom right it says in the factory information that the side with the stamp is finished finer than the back side. Clearly there's a way, but the exact details I'm sure are gone along with the original manufacturer.

I did post that picture . The swaty picture I just posted is suppose to be the same one side being finer than the other, but this was done by Franz Swaty . They may have poured the finer mix in the mold first and then added another mix of powder before firing it . But I don't really know how they did it. I once read that even the people that produced the famous "00 frictionite" hone confide in Franz Swaty . Why would they do that if they could just grind their hone against a Franz swaty and produce the same great results? Sand paper is rougher than wood and if you sand the wood it doesn't take on the texture of the sand paper.

Well, I don't know a whole lot about firing clay - that was my grandmother's hobby, and unfortunately the house they moved to when I was 10 or so didn't have a spare 220 outlet she could use with her Kiln. So I never really got to learn much about it.

But to my way of thinking, the only way to get 2 different mixes would be to have 2 separate batches, one coarse and one fine, make 2 halves, and smush them together. Kind of like you see with the frictionite I think? And my American Hone Co. barber hone. I also notice those tend to be 2 different colors, which makes me think they colored the clays to make it easy to identify which mix is which and, eventually which side does what.

Swatys on the other hand are thin, and appear (at least at the surface) to be a mix of the same stuff through and through. And that stuff is actually coarse 600 grit sized cutting material lapped so smooth that it almost doesn't protrude above the surface to give the performance of an 8K+ stone without the fuss getting powder that is both uniform and finer than 2 microns.

They're definitely interesting little hones, and the more I use them the more I like them, and think barber hones in general were undervalued.