I got a 2" wide one from Woodcraft that came in today. Man their shipping is slow. Took 10 days to get here. I don't have any other hones and was hoping for an inexpensive hone to use for touching up my razors. It was pretty close to flat. Just about 1 mm dished on both sides. I used 120 grit wet or dry on a glass table to get it flat and it took under 10 minutes. Then I ran it over 320 and 400 grit which was the finest big sheet of sandpaper I had around. Done in about 20 minutes.

After reading about the tough times some people have had flattening these things, I could have one of the softer stones and it might not be a great touch up hone. I read Glen's first post and he said the soft ones will produce slurry with just the razor and mine doesn't do that so maybe it'll be ok after all.

I couldn't resist trying it out. I've got a cheap eBay Solingen razor I got a while back so I figured I could practice on it since I've never honed a razor before. The blade had a bit of an edge. Didn't cut arm hair or anything but it felt about knife sharp to my terribly uncalibrated thumb pad. I did about 50 x-strokes with moderate pressure, then about 50 more with light pressure. I almost couldn't believe it when it cut arm hair at skin level or slightly above along the whole blade.

I'll work on this blade some more tomorrow evening but I'm pretty excited to think I might be able to shave with it. We'll have to see how that goes though.