I would recommend you ask the mods for a lifetime ban from SRP. Straight razor shaving has a lot of acquisition disorders that are expensive enough without frequent buyer's remorses. SRP is full of enablers :)
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Yeah you're right I finally bought it from fendrihan for 126$ tax incl. After looking elsewhere I noticed it was one of these marketing gimmicks where they list a "regular" price and show you their "special" price. I thought it was a sale or something.. silly me.
Heh, unfortunately the direct-from-China stones I've seen that cheap are three 1/3" slabs glued together. Were that not the case I'd happily suggest those as an alternative in the Cnat Lotto game. I'm sure paying direct from a Chinese marketer is much cheaper than getting from a US retailer that had to pay import and shipping mark ups.
On that note, I see that Woodcraft is slowly creeping their price up. Not that long ago the price was the same as you find on Ebay. I still see them going for $30 there.
I hate sites/stores that do that!
Edit 2: All this talk of Cnats is making me want another. I don't even need another, I already have a good one!
Yes. Either they buy directly from woodwell, or they have an agent who does. Japan woodworker (one of their sub-companies now after it sold out to them) also sells mujingfang (woodwell) planes. I have never had anything from woodwell that really caused me problems, but I don't have enough of the cnats to make a definite claim.
In 5 cnats, two were from woodwell, both of those excellent. The other three were from various places, one was too soft to be anything other than nagura, a second had a fault across the middle and was a bit coarse but able to finish a razor, and the third was reasonably good. None as good as the woodwell versions.
Woodcraft has a really high cost structure with franchised local stores, and their prices are terrible (I am a woodworker and was before shaving, and always had trouble getting anything at their stores because of the prices, even though I wanted to support them when they were here as a local franchise). I had some back and forth with them and they gave me the first of those two cnats (the woodwells) because they wanted me to give some feedback on the stone. I didn't know enough about it at the time except to know that it was very slow as a woodworking stone and if you slurried it, it was no 12000 with a heavy slurry on it. I sold it, and finally last year bought another woodwell boxed stone directly from alibaba. All things considered, though, it's one of the things that woodcraft has that the price really isn't *that* bad, but you still have to pay shipping unless they have an event. Our franchise went out, and another one popped up here much later, but I don't know where it is. I'm kind of into making my own tools at this point, so there's not much for me there.
aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, good stones, and I learned after using an arkansas that the stuff about folks doing 400 laps on them is not necessary if you just learn to use some pressure to do most of the initial finish work and then finish up with light pressure. They cut so slowly that it really hardly matters which direction you're moving the razor once you get to clear water.