Thread: washita confusion

My daily shaver is a razor that's only been honed on a washita. I've never gotten that sort of jnat silk edge straight off of the washita, but I have a routine that works quite well.

Hone the razor as normal (washita only). Then linen. Then hone again only with light strokes. Then linen. Then maybe light strokes again and linen one more time.

The first shave will be ho hum, but serviceable. After each subsequent shave, I drag the razor with edge trailing strokes in the washita (the stone must be clean, of course), about ten, and then linen and leather again. Not enough honing in each of those ten light strokes to really remove the edge, just enough to correct anything that may be awry at the bevel or deflected steel.

Within one or two of those sessions, the razor feels like it's been honed on the finest natural stone you can find, and it shaves as if it's been honed on a double-fine coticule (this method probably works with coticules, too), presumably because the bevel is being kept in geometry with each iteration and any bits of trash on the edge are being taken away by the linen.

A view of one of these edges in the metallurgical scope looks like a scratched up bevel, but an edge that is as quiet and as good as any that you'll see anywhere short of tenth micron abrasives, etc (even those have the danger in over-use of drawing an edge out that snaps off on the strop and leaves a flimsy foil mess).

As far as washitas not cutting something, they will not cut vanadium or chromium carbides, but just about every steel has "glue" that holds the matrix together, and the washita will cut any of them. If the carbides are large, it will just rip them out or break them out leaving the matrix with carbide voids. In better and plainer steels, there is no large carbide ball in a matrix going on. There are iron carbides in steel above the eutectoid limit (could be completely wrong with that term, but it's something like 0.73% carbon or some such number), but those are small and uniform.

No clue how big carbides are in general, I thought they'd be smaller in the LN steel, because it's cryo treated (like friodur) - it could be clumps of them. Based on the scale of the picture, each void at the edge is about one thousandth of an inch, and that is a serious problem. I haven't seen the same thing on a friodur razor. It's possible that they are just better than the lie nielsen plane irons (or the cryo treatment is better).

The whole supersteel thing drives me up a wall, anyway. It's better for production and things like dies, etc, or cutting 75 lengths of rope while you're at sea with a knife that's not 66 hardness, but it's piss poor for day to day things that we do otherwise (like shave, slice things, chisel, etc), and in the balance of all things (sharpening time, sharpening retries due to subpar results, unexpected small edge failures) there is no time savings due to stuff like S30V. I have more edge pictures that are interesting, but I'll have to track them down. New system at work deems most of the things I look at early morning or over lunch to be unsafe. Safe to say, though, the microscope has confirmed my hunches about what's really practical.

I'll be back with more boring details later!!

I put up a series of photographs (micrographs) at another site that plainly show the carbides in a HSS blade I made, (they looked to be about 4-5 microns in diameter on this particular blade) and the effect of various sharpening media on the blade and the carbides, but I think according to site rules here it's not kosher to post a link. Also I think they were Photobucket links, so they may be dead now. It is quite clear from the micrographs that non-diamond abrasives don't do a whole lot, if any, cutting of the carbides. Plenty of ripping out, but not much cutting.

Originally Posted by eKretz

I put up a series of photographs (micrographs) at another site that plainly show the carbides in a HSS blade I made, (they looked to be about 4-5 microns in diameter on this particular blade) and the effect of various sharpening media on the blade and the carbides, but I think according to site rules here it's not kosher to post a link. Also I think they were Photobucket links, so they may be dead now. It is quite clear from the micrographs that non-diamond abrasives don't do a whole lot, if any, cutting of the carbides. Plenty of ripping out, but not much cutting.

Were they vanadium carbides? Turning tools are full of vanadium carbides. I don't like them too much, but they do wear slowly if you can manage to keep them in the matrix.

Even chromium carbides aren't going to be touched. The best I can figure, the dots on the LN iron are about 25 microns. I have no clue what the typical carbide size would be in cryo treated A2, but I thought the carbides sort of spread out and bonded together a little more. Maybe they're being pulled out in bunches.

There's one thing posted earlier in this thread that I thought I'd comment on since I'm here. The lilywhite and No 1 washitas are generally coarse "soft" washitas if they are labeled, unless they're labeled otherwise. I don't know if pike labeled no 1 washitas for fineness, but they definitely did for lilywhites at some point in time. The end labels will say "soft and fast cutting" or "medium hard and fine cutting" or "hard and fine cutting".

Right now, I have one that was labeled Hard, though little of the label is left. It's very fine cutting. The bulk of the lilywhites are coarser and faster than the unmarked washitas, though, because that cutting speed was preferable to most of the market (people sharpening knives, tools or initial carving tool work). A clear white lower density stone that could leave a fine edge and cut fast was the thing (this predates synthetic stones).

The finer ones, I'm not sure who they were aimed at. Maybe the carvers liked them? All of them will end up about the same fineness if you let them go long enough, unless you sharpen something with laminated steel (japanese tools and old western tools with wrought iron will keep the washitas awake - Lee Valley's V11 steel will put them to sleep very quickly).

It doesn't matter too much, but the labeling has less to do with quality of the stones (all of them came from the same mine in big clear sections) and more to do with a guarantee of a certain level of fineness. Old no 1 stones are relatively coarse, sometimes identical in appearance to lilywhite stones (probably depending on what they had to cut) and other times they're mottled. The lilywhite stones were always clear.

The rosy red stones were just clear stones with relatively faint pink streaks in them, but as far as i know, the labeling was otherwise unrelated to fineness. they bring huge bucks with a nice label now, if you can even find them.

(obviously, nothing with bright colors, and nothing with a newer label that's not norton has anything to do with washita stones. They're just soft arkansas stones.

Originally Posted by DaveW

Were they vanadium carbides? Turning tools are full of vanadium carbides. I don't like them too much, but they do wear slowly if you can manage to keep them in the matrix.

Even chromium carbides aren't going to be touched. The best I can figure, the dots on the LN iron are about 25 microns. I have no clue what the typical carbide size would be in cryo treated A2, but I thought the carbides sort of spread out and bonded together a little more. Maybe they're being pulled out in bunches.

Not sure. The grade of HSS was T15 so they may have been tungsten carbides. Although there are probably more than one type present in a lot of steels since they're almost always alloyed with a lot of small percentages of different stuff.

Originally Posted by eKretz

Not sure. The grade of HSS was T15 so they may have been tungsten carbides. Although there are probably more than one type present in a lot of steels since they're almost always alloyed with a lot of small percentages of different stuff.

I looked it up. Heavily alloyed with tungsten, chromium and vanadium. Definitely beyond the scope of washitas! The early tungsten high speed steels were actually quite nice, but they're not common now.

Originally Posted by DaveW

There's one thing posted earlier in this thread that I thought I'd comment on since I'm here. The lilywhite and No 1 washitas are generally coarse "soft" washitas if they are labeled, unless they're labeled otherwise. I don't know if pike labeled no 1 washitas for fineness, but they definitely did for lilywhites at some point in time. The end labels will say "soft and fast cutting" or "medium hard and fine cutting" or "hard and fine cutting".

Right now, I have one that was labeled Hard, though little of the label is left. It's very fine cutting. The bulk of the lilywhites are coarser and faster than the unmarked washitas, though, because that cutting speed was preferable to most of the market (people sharpening knives, tools or initial carving tool work). A clear white lower density stone that could leave a fine edge and cut fast was the thing (this predates synthetic stones).

The finer ones, I'm not sure who they were aimed at. Maybe the carvers liked them? All of them will end up about the same fineness if you let them go long enough, unless you sharpen something with laminated steel (japanese tools and old western tools with wrought iron will keep the washitas awake - Lee Valley's V11 steel will put them to sleep very quickly).

It doesn't matter too much, but the labeling has less to do with quality of the stones (all of them came from the same mine in big clear sections) and more to do with a guarantee of a certain level of fineness. Old no 1 stones are relatively coarse, sometimes identical in appearance to lilywhite stones (probably depending on what they had to cut) and other times they're mottled. The lilywhite stones were always clear.

The rosy red stones were just clear stones with relatively faint pink streaks in them, but as far as i know, the labeling was otherwise unrelated to fineness. they bring huge bucks with a nice label now, if you can even find them.

(obviously, nothing with bright colors, and nothing with a newer label that's not norton has anything to do with washita stones. They're just soft arkansas stones.

I agree that most of the old unlabeled lily whites were soft/fast. I have a labeled soft/fast that is the fastest cutting with an edge as good as the others. They are just an anomaly that they are so course but leave an edge around a 6-7k pre-stropping.
Another anomaly that I had was a labeled rosy red pike stone that had little dots of Red throughout but a great big chinch of Red too. Almost like Red paint was spilled. According to old catalogs they were known to be a bit faster then a lily white but didn’t leave an edge as fine. That was what I have experienced too. I’ll see if I can find the pictures of it.
I have a No. 1 that even when the surface is dressed it is much more “glass like” and cuts slower than my Lily whites but doesn’t leave an edge like the Lily whites either. A bit better than a soft Arkansas but not much.
Just some anomalies, if you will. The only thing I have found to be consistent from one stone to the next is a labeled and graded (end label) Lily White from the Pike mine.

I had a no 1 that was half mottled (pretty much on one end) and the other half mostly clear. I think they were hit and miss in terms of consistency, because I've seen pure white ones. I really liked the one that I had that was mottled, but I sold it to someone who begged it off of me, and haven't gotten a no 1 since because labeled stones have gone through the roof. I think the one I had (with a good label) was $38 on ebay....that was a long time ago, I'll admit. Maybe 2010 or something.

Not sure how I'd categorize my unlabeled stones (I've had about 40, I guess). They're all over the board and some are very fine. I've gotten one or two that would pass for lilywhite, but most are a touch harder and finer and some a lot so. It's possible the clear ones that I have have just lost their old label. It's almost as if there are no hard and fast rules with the washitas other than to try them and see what they're like.

My least favorite one was a pure white washita from norton/behr manning that just said "washita oilstone" on the label. It was perfectly uniform, but twice as fine as any lilywhite I've seen (which is, I guess, why it had no number on it).

I did track down rosy red pictures, and you're right, some of them are quite vivid. My apologies on that. I've never seen a vivid one in person.

Originally Posted by DaveW

My daily shaver is a razor that's only been honed on a washita. I've never gotten that sort of jnat silk edge straight off of the washita, but I have a routine that works quite well
.....

I'll be back with more boring details later!!

Thanks...
it is valuable to learn how folk get the most out of their rocks.
Modern man made abrasives almost let us ignore the tricks of the trade.
ALMOST.

Thanks for sharing your tricks.

ok, i started this thread because i am confused about getting a benshmark about what to expect from washitas. here are my thoughts about this and i don t want to offend anybody, i really appreciate your comments here, they were very helpfull to tune me into this and i especially like to thank DaveW for joining in since his youtube videos lead me into this.

i appologise for beeing to dump to link several commets here.

- density:
comment from eKretz:

There are slight differences between Washitas just like there are between the different main Arkansas stones. There used to be a range of about 6 densities of Washitas IIRC from reading many old historical geological reports. They were differentiated by testing how much water (by weight) they could absorb. This basically was a test of their porosity. The finest would absorb something like 1% of their weight in water, the coarsest more like 6% - 7%. They were graded Lily White, #1, #2 etc. with Lily White being the finest and most uniform stones and higher numbers being more coarse (softer and more porous basically) and nonuniform in grit/porosity. #1 would be very close to a Lily White with perhaps some black speckling or very slight nonuniformity of grit or porosity size.

Sure, as I recall, the Woodworkers Delight, Mechanics Friend, Rosy Red etc. were all equivalent to #1 Washita, so on the finer end of the scale.

conclusion: the lily white are a finer stone, no1 one a litle less fine aso, and it s referred to the density. ok, we all know about this density stuff.

problem:
comment from DaveW:
There's one thing posted earlier in this thread that I thought I'd comment on since I'm here. The lilywhite and No 1 washitas are generally coarse "soft" washitas if they are labeled, unless they're labeled otherwise.
The end labels will say "soft and fast cutting" or "medium hard and fine cutting" or "hard and fine cutting".

even more problem with the comment fron DaveW:
I have a No. 1 that even when the surface is dressed it is much more “glass like” and cuts slower than my Lily whites but doesn’t leave an edge like the Lily whites either. A bit better than a soft Arkansas but not much.

there were 2 washis on ebay this week, one called soft, one medium hard.

conclusion: the density stuff is NOT the thing that is eponymous for calling a washita a lily white. seems to me, thats all about appearence, meaning being white, and maybe a more evenly gritted one, leaving more consistent results.

problem:
comment from DaveW: The lilywhite stones were always clear.

i ve seen some lilly white s that were modeled. there is a labeled modeled one on ebay right now.

conclusion: it can t be appearance either.
so: i thought of getting an idea from page 1 + 2 about washitas, now i m even more confused.

conclusion: just figure them out, it s all just names, am i wrong or did i miss something specific?