Thread: Has Anyone Ever Honed With a Lydian Stone?

Hoo Kay! I suckered for one. Anything better than a same sized Barber hone for that price is a winner!
Thanks!
~Richard
PS, remember when the Arkies were the only naturals most anyone knew about other than some barbers?
I do and Arkies were all we had in the early fifties in tri-hones at the butcher shop and country club kitchen. No Carborundum's allowed!

You and me both Richard! I got one a while back but haven't got around to testing mine yet.

Well I am a little bit wondering on this so-called Lydian stones. Never heard of a material or a rock called Lydian.
Normally the gold test- or touchstones are made from black arkansas stone. I have two teststones that are clearly surgical black arks.
One of them I got from the company Müller in germany and I spoke with the owner a lot about these stones and aqcuired one there. They import the black Arkansas directly from Hot springs and cut them into whetstones and very small gold touchstones.

So are you really sure that your Lydian hone is not a "simple" black ark?

Originally Posted by hatzicho

...snip...
One of them I got from the company Müller in germany and I spoke with the owner a lot about these stones and aqcuired one there. They import the black Arkansas directly from Hot springs and cut them into whetstones and very small gold touchstones.

So are you really sure that your Lydian hone is not a "simple" black ark?

So, either way we win!
Thank you!
~Richard

Originally Posted by Geezer

So, either way we win!
Thank you!
~Richard

You are absolutely correct Richard!
Maybe not when I look on the prices for the stones of the webside that is mentioned here. But a black ark is a fantastic finisher and even if the Lydian stones really exist as a single species - it will be hard to beat a good black ark!

From what I have read, there are a lot of different varieties of gold testing stone. One person I talked to even uses frosted black glass to do his testing. I did a little googling before I got my stone and I think there is a good chance that the Lydian stones (also known as Lydite) are black novaculite like black Arks. Here is an excerpt I bookmarked regarding that:

At the Silurian/Devonian boundary black cherts (locally called lydites or flinty slates) developed from radiolarians mainly in the Frankenwald region and in the Vogtland in Germany.

Of great importance are the novaculites from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas which were deposited at the close of the Devonian. The novaculites are milky-white, thinly-bedded cherts of great hardness; they underwent a low-grade metamorphism during the Ouachita orogeny. Their mineralogy consists of microquartz with a grain-size of 5 to 35 µ. The microquartz is derived from the sclerae of sponges and the tests of radiolarians.

During the Mississippian black lydites were sedimented in the Rhenish Massif in Germany.[7] The Lower Permian of Sicily hosts radiolarites in limestone olistoliths,[8] at the same period radiolarites have been reported from northwestern Turkey (Karakaya complex of the Pontides).

Got around to lapping my stone today and I can definitely confirm that the one from the Amazon link at least is either a black Ark or darn near the same exact thing. Laps slowly and cuts just like my black translucent Arkie.