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My New Nakayama Maruichi!
Hey all,
So it arrived today from Japan: My beautiful new Japanese natural Nakayama Maruichi stone from OLD_SCHOOL.
I'll post some photos below, but I want to first talk about this stone a little bit.
It's a hard stone and fairly slow, but is wonderful to hone on! I gave it a whirl on my Boker that was shave-ready, but didn't quite shave as well as I would like it to. It was previously finished on a coticule. So I gave it a bunch of laps (I really lost track, probably about 100) on this wonderful little stone and just enjoyed the experience. It was like honing on highly polished glass it's so smooth, you have no idea. I've honed on coticules and my dark blue and yellow/green eschers, but this felt even more special when my razor just glided across its surface.
I inspected the edge of the razor under 30x magnification, and the bevel looks amazing! I stropped it a good number of times on my plain linen then leather, then tried some hairs tests just for fun (of which I have some of my girlfriend's hair stored for such purposes :)). I barely touched the edge of the razor to the hair and it just fell down, cutting it effortlessly.
So enough of the honing and tests, how about the shave?? Well after I showered I lathered up well and began to shave. I started with my right sideburns and it sliced through the hair so smoothly and easily!! No pressure needed, and it left my cheek near BBS with one pass WTG. :eek:
I finished off the rest of the shave with much of the same delight and lack of effort. I got no cuts, got a very close shave, and no irritation.
It was like this edge had all the sharpness you could ever want and the smoothness (i.e. left my skin very comfy) from a coticule. The shave that I got off of this stone by FAR tops my coticules and even my yellow/green escher. It's as smooth as using chromium oxide paste afterwards, but way more fun to use. :D
I would like to thank OLD_SCHOOL for all of his help choosing this particular hone, as it was not an easy decision to make. He was extremely helpful and answered all of my questions very quickly. Not only that but he tests all of his stones on razors, so you're gauranteed to get a quality finishing stone suited for razors. :tu
Now on to the pictures. This stone is a very beautiful light green colour with exquisite brown streaks around the top and bottom of the stone. It's a perfect sized hone for me, as I don't generally like stones too wide. It's approximately 18 cm x 4 cm x 1.5 cm (7" x 1.5" x 5/8" roughly). There is a chip in the side of it on the side which doesn't affect the honing surface at all, and actually gives you a good view of the strata inside. On the right hand side about half way up it looks like a crack in the picture, but it isn't at all! It's perfectly smooth and it's just the colouration of the surface, very cool.
The stamps on the surface are very vivid, and essentially translate into "Nakaya Maruichi". The vertical markings means it's a genuine Nakayama mined stone, and the ones at the bottom means it's a Maruichi brand. There's also a "Maruka" stamp on the one end of the stone (as seen in pic #6), but it's fairly faint and shows up terribly in pictures. It's fixed to a nice piece of Japanese Cypress (which smells wonderful BTW).
Well here are the pictures, thanks for reading my long post! (Feel free to supplement my thread with pictures of your own Japanese naturals...)
