Thread: Quality Variation in Black Ark Stones

I bought a combo stone from a seller on ebay, one of the no-name black and soft ark stones to use as a base for dumping diamonds on the surface. Sort of a novelty, I guess.

I have heard that some of these stones are bad (pinnacle brand has the reputation of sending black stones that can't finish tool edges) and I think I might've found someone selling the same stones. See attached pictures. One is of the stone itself, and the other with my beloved dan's stone in front of it - the side of the dans is unoiled, it's only ever been used with razors and never slopped with oil like happens with tools.

In my time of pigging stones, I have bought dan's, halls, norton, natural whetstone, a whole gaggle of vintage, one labeled smiths, one labeled best, case, but I've never seen anything like this (this is what they call a "highest grade of fineness" black arkansas). I have really liked all (all of the stones from all of the retailers) of them until this. What smith's calls a hard isn't what someone would finish a razor with, but it's really not a bad approximation of a washita for tool work (it just doesn't quite have the top gear that you can get out of a washita, but they're something like 15 bucks used and make a great bevel setter if you want to go that way).....but this one is unusable in any way, a first for me. Vendor (not to be named - apparently that's TOS no-no) says the difference between these two stones is in finish and that I can't make the claim that the one in the background will not ever finish. They have gone silent since then, but paypal/ebay will side with a buyer no matter what, so the conclusion of this already known.

Anyway, I went out reading a little further and even found some complaints about the large stones with my beloved dans! (someone had gotten a pocket stone and then liked it, bought a big one, and found it not to be that great). Perhaps nothing is perfectly safe, but the good retailers are still relatively low risk (and you could always return something, I suppose).

And then I went to the dan's site and drowned my sorrows in a 10x3x1 translucent from the specials page - I'd show a picture, but the new dan's site drops the listings as soon as you buy (they used to stay up for a while because they didn't have a cart system).

Caveat honer with off-label stones! This soft/hard combination has the same color scheme and porosity as the $1 stone at my local dollar tree. Sharpening something on the surface of it yields about the same edge quality.