Thread: washita confusion

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.