Thread: Need a bit of slate advice

Originally Posted by gssixgun

Slate,

There are quite a few running around right now, most people are NOT disclosing the sources, I have found a few out

Most are Paving and Decorative stone cast off.. People add fancy names and high grit ratings and we have new "Stones"

All of them have started off cheap and as soon as the "FanBoy" talk kicks into high gear the pattern develops

The grit rating increases
The price increases
The hype increases

IME slate is all about the slurry feel, test that and you usually can figure out if the chunk-o- rock is a finisher
If the slurry feels silky and has no grittiness you might have a winner..

Personally I like the people that are straight up front and honest that say "Hey I cut up a pool table slate" try it out (Been testing that for a month or so with good results and reviews from customers)




JMHO here

ps: Yes I got a set of the Welsh slates on this side of the pond, I think I paid $50ish for all three

The one that was called Dragon Tongue sucked
The Purple one was pretty good
The one that was compared to a Thuri was pretty good very silky feeling

(I never used them for a customer's razor they didn't pass that threshold)

None of them matched my Thuri as a finisher and I sold them for what I paid

Here comes the funny thing, sounds like youre giving us some new advice in concerns of „slate and paving stones“ well you actually do not Glenn. Not one slate beeing quarried in the past has been quarried on its own or „only“ for the purpose of honing. Well probably some one men show business but i cant recall any right now...

The honing stone business was always and ever a side business of the quarrying operation...easy to explain because you would never made enough money with that business for sharpening stones or razor hones on their own. So if there is no need to say „iam cutting pool table slate“ because everybody knows that the origin must have been in most cases an already existing quarrying operation. Besides of some rock hounds trying to find smaller spots of „local“ Material...most likely i rarely got material which was fine enough.

I had them all The Müllers Water Grindstone, The MST Slate, The Dragons Tongue and some others. I still prefer my vintage Thuringians today, something i can fully agre with youre statement, hard to come by these stones...

Much like the Japanese stones, that were curried at the mouth of the mine and the “Decider” had to choose which stones were worth more and easier to sell to the hordes of carpenters, and worth carrying down the mountain literally on the backs of workers and loaded on to wooden backpack racks.

The smaller, finer stones were pitched over the side with the slag. Today folks are picking through that rubble and selling them on eBay as razor stones.

Every old mine or quarry has it's dump pile or in the case of mines tailings. Sometimes really good stuff could be found there. Quarries for ornamental stones go for the large slabs while the small pieces not commercially viable go to the dumps.

Truth can be stranger than fiction. Back in the days of the Klondike gold rush they had problems separating and refining the gold. This stuff they called "black sand" was fouling everything up. They had to bring in experts to get rid of this sand which went onto the tailings. Years later they discovered the "black Sand" was really Platinum.