Thread: Stone translation

I have a Smiths Tri-hone in Fine medium and coarse. Most people in these forums speak of hones in numbers. Is there somewhere I can get a cross reference between numbers and names? I've looked in the wiki and so far no luck.

Thanks,
Tom

The tri-hone uses arkansas stones, am I correct ?

Take a look at this chart Sharpening Stone Grit Chart

According to the above chart, the finest Arkansas stone would be the equivalent of a Norton 4000.

As I recall those Smiths tri-hones arent the best for razors. I think they are all pretty low grits, something like 500, 750 and 2000 or there abouts.

There have been discussions in the past about them and the consensus seems to be that they are too coarse for razors. You really need something like a Norton 4/8 for straight razors, as these grits are high enough to sharpen and polish. The grits on the tri-hone are basically edge repair and bevel setting, and would be far too coarse to shave off.

I think a couple of guys have used the tri-hone as part of their honing progression as a bevel setter, but they have used finer stones afterwards to further refine the edge.

Heres a thread on the tri-hone:

http://straightrazorpalace.com/begin...weet-hone.html

The hones that use numbers can do so because they are synthetic hones with a predetermined size of grit embedded in them. Natural stones, like the Arkansas hones, do not have a grit rating because they were not manufactured with a specific size of grit. Any time you see a grit equivalent for a natural stone, at best you are getting a rough estimate of comparison with a synthetic equivalent, but your particular stone may be quite different.

I don't know, have I ever mentioned that the Chinese hone should not be called a 12k?

Just to add confusion, it's not even simple to compare grit ratings from different industrial standards. Nothing in nature is perfect, so when you manufacture or sort grit particles, what you really end up with is a normal distribution of particle sizes (a bell curve) with a mean and a variance. How much variance is allowed, is spelled out in the particular industrial standard whose numbers you are using. Thus, a sheet of American 1000 grit wet/dry sandpaper is not identical to a Japanese 1000 grit waterstone.