Thread: Chinese Natural- Great New Discovery

I have an exciting new discovery to share.

About 2 and a half months ago I was browsing around some of the razor and cutlery shops in Hong Kong (where I currently live), and I found an interesting little shop where I saw an old chinese gentleman honing on some really cool looking stones.

His english was very restricted, but after a lot of pointing, and my trustworthy english to chinese dictionary on my PDA, he finally dug out some hones that was wrapped in plastic with chinese writing on it. I unwrapped one and I was instantly excited!

I explained to him that I want to hone straight razors with it, and I got the following out of him "Welly goood for lazol". I bought 2 of them for a relatively decent price, and lapped one as soon as I got home. Boy, was he right about that statement of his!

I sharpened a Henckels Friodur, and a Dovo Facharbeit on the hone, using this hone and nothing else......HOLY HECK!! is all I can say. The shaves I got was absolutely BBS and even silky smoother than my Naniwa 12K!!

Under my powerful little 100X hand-held mini microscope, the edges looked absolutely superb.

My feeling is that this is a very fine, but relatively fast cutting stone, and the finish I get is in excess of my 12K Naniwa....So, it may just be in the category of the coticules or Eschers, IMHO.

I felt that I needed a real hone expert to try this one out.

JimmyHAD was the man who has helped me a lot so far, so I sent him one to have a go at honing on it.

Well, it seems my feeling about that this was a winner was 100% correct, because even Jimmy was impressed with it, and got BBS silky smooth shaves out of it!

I will ask Jimmy leave some more comments, and his findings, on this C-Nat for us all to read on this thread if he wishes to do so?

Since then, I went back 3 times to the shop, but it has been hard to get more of these, but I have managed to get hold of 5 more of them. They all still need lapping, as they are only rough, machine cut hones, but they are all the same, superb hones as the one I have, and the one I sent Jimmy. Hopefully I can get some more of these in the near future! Will keep enquiring about them at the shop.

Here are some pics to indulge for those of you who are interested in hones: