Thread: Arkansas Adventures...

Well, we know it wasn't the stone's fault.

Yep, all my questionable shaving technique and not the stone. I've got a second Morley OTW that looks in good shape, so maybe I'll try again this week. I'm pretty content with how all my other blades shave, so I don't want to mess with them. The only blades I have left are kinda thin like that old Toorey. There's no point trying something smaller than 5/8 as a test bed, since I'm still not all that proficient with a small blade.

I mentioned earlier that I had cobbled together a sort of Nagura set from (mostly) Western stones. Bear with me a moment, and if you're heavily into Jnats avert your eyes from this post. It may get a little sacriligious.




You've been warned.

So I took the dinged Morley and decided to play a bit. My Arkansas one-stone solution:



Nothing was used but what is pictured to work out the ding and hone up the blade. Starting with my Naniwa 800 grit Botan Nagura, I rinsed the stones, worked up a thick slurry, and ground away the chip. That's the little pink stone on the far left. This stuff actually can break down a bit and get a fair polish, but I was using this for heavy lifting. So once the ding was out - only took a few minutes - I did 20 light laps and washed the Arkie off. Didn't really do any dilutions with this stone. Pink milk, remove scratches, set bevel, move on. Next phase: Coticule Tenjou Nagura. That's the yellow one next to the pink one for those unfamiliar with coticules.

This one actually had a bit of heavy lifting of it's own to do. Garnets don't break down like the material found in Jnats or the stones I use following this, so it'll only get a polish around 4-6K. But the important thing at this phase really was to eliminate the deep cuts made by the Naniwa Botan. And the coticule does this rather well. So I cut this phase a little early as well, and only diluted from a thick milky slurry down to a medium slurry. More than enough to rid the blade of the Botan scratches.

From there we get into the good stuff. Rinse stone, break out the The Dragon's Tongue Mejiro Nagura. Little black stone just to the right of the razor. This somewhat overlaps the range of the coticule on the low end with a milky slurry and brings us up close to the 8K area of polish by the time the slurry is faint. Pretty nice, if I do say so myself. Also rather convenient because anything missed by that little yellow rock will be cleared away at the beginning phase here. A little bit of overlap/redundancy breeds success, so I started with a milky slurry and diluted until it was barely noticeable that the water wasn't pure.

And the final phase - Black Welsh Slate Tomo Nagura. That's the last one on the far right. This stone can overlap a little, so rather than start off with a milky slurry I started somewhere around the middle. Besides, this little fellow is hard and doesn't like creating slurry too much. I'd have been there an hour or better just trying to slurry the stone if I wanted that milky consistency here. Same general method. Several dilutions until it was only just barely visible that the water was cloudy.

For the final phase, I rinsed the stone off one more time and flipped it to the polished face. 200 laps on pure water, and we have a smokin' Arkansas edge. 1 pass with light touch up was more than enough to clean away a day's growth. And it'll only get better the next time it's touched up. Not half bad for a little over a half hour's work.

Not sure if that counts as setting a bevel on an Arkansas stone, but where there's a will, there's a way!

Many roads to Rome. Thanks so much for sharing yours! Congrats on an awesome shave too!

Enjoyable read. Thanks.