ZY Razor hone - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly...

[Marshal]

So, as promised I honed a razor on the ZY Razor hone I ordered off ebay. We'll start with the good:

The packaging was surprisingly good. It was in one of those bubble-wrap bags and surrounded by styrofoam on all sides. I could chuck this thing against a brick wall full force and the hone would've probably been OK. One side was already pretty much dead flat, and felt smooth enough to fit my rigorous standard for a natural surface - I felt like I could've just take a razor right to the hone without messing with it. Of course I screwed that up brushing the rubbing stone against it as a test and wound up lapping and polishing it anyway.

I honed a Torrey Straight on it, setting the bevel on a Norton 4K, cleaning it up on the 8, then moving on to the ZY hone. Feed back was a teeny bit gritty - less so than my coticule, but even after polishing up to 8K (yes OCD, I know) it still had texture to it. But under a 30x loupe I saw neither improvement nor degradation compared to a Norton 8K edge. The shave reflected this, I would place it somewhere above a Norton 8K but below my Chinese 12K. So it isn't a bad hone by any means. For reference I treated it as I would the Guangxi hone coming off the Norton 8K - that is, 50 laps pure water, 50 on shaving lather.

The bad: They put the stickers on the honing surface - it was a pain in the backside to get the glue from the stickers off. The little rubbing stone that came with it felt about like concrete. Very coarse, and would totally trash the surface of the hone if you like a good polish/burnish. I was a little surprised to see that rather than 1 contiguous piece of rock, they took 3 - 8"x3" slates, stacked them, and glued them together. This in itself isn't problematic unless they used 3 different grade pieces of slate. If the top is good razor hone and the bottom 2 are trash slate, you could be in for disappointment if you actually manage to wear through the good slate.

The ugly: A picture is worth 1,000 words -



So, after lapping it with a worn DMT I went to sand the scratches from the DMT out in a baking pan that I lined with sand paper. As soon as I flipped the rock over, the center stone split right down the middle and half my hone fell into the pan. I guess now I have 2 ZY razor hones? Considering the middle layer split and it didn't come unglued I guess I really can't fault ZY for this. It didn't have an obvious split or flaw there, and I looked pretty close. I'm not sure if that's the result of shipping damage, or just a random schism in natural material. Just slate being slate I guess. I like the way the honing surface performs, maybe I'll just glue the dern thing back together, or cut up the back piece to make slurry stones.

It doesn't appear to be the Guangxi/Chinese 12K that we're all familiar with, so it has that going for it. Knowing what I know now, were I to order another I might stick with the 8x3 format, but opt for a thinner hone rather than paying more just to have 3 stacked and glued together.

More photos, wet and with slurry made from a diamond plate:





edit - the circle in that last pic is from the sticker/glue. It's been lapped away now, but they could've stuck that on the unfinished surface or something.