Thread: Have you guys heard about the godly BBW?

What are you guys stropping with?

I suspect that the most important part here
is that the bevel is well set and then the
light touch honing finishes things.

Garnets in BBW are fragile enough to get knocked
down almost flat where they then cut as if
they were a lot finer then measurements might
indicate.

This is the magic of naturals.

As for slurry try half a pea size dot of
white tooth paste and dilute that down
bit by bit. Works wonders on barber hones.

I only have a yellow coticule, but have read about the BBWs at the Belgian site coticule.be. Yellows have lots of small garnets and BBW have fewer and larger garnets.

All these garnets are nearly spherical, and given equal pressure the smaller ones can cut deeper into steel than can the larger ones because they're sharper little points. So the hone with smaller particles is actually a faster hone.

But, in the slurry, there's a different dynamic that makes the hone with the larger particles give a sharper edge. As you push your razor along through the slurry, some garnets are pinned between the steel and the hone and they abrade. However, you're also pushing your razor through a pudding filled with suspended abrasive particles and they're dinging off the honed edge. Imagine driving a gravel road behind someone with big knobby gravel-throwing tires, and you HAVE to follow 20 feet behind him. Your hood's going to get shredded.

The yellow stone, even though its garnets are smaller, puts way more of them into the slurry and they limit how keen an edge you can get because they keep banging against it. The blue stone's slurry doesn't have as many garnets suspended, so fewer of them bang into your honed edge. So it gets keener than you can get it in yellow slurry, because your abrasion-to-collision ratio is more favorable.

However, that keen edge won't be as smooth as you can get it with the yellow stone's smaller garnets.

So set a bevel in yellow slurry, hone a keen edge in blue slurry, then polish your edge back on the wet, slurry-free yellow stone.

That's almost as long as the primary source, which you can read at the coticule site. Click the Information Mine link, then pull down to FAQ, then read the first link ("How does a Belgian Blue Whetstone compare to a Coticule..."). The webmaster, Bart, has lots of great stuff there. He posts here on SRP too.

So many Becauses and Howevers and counterintuitives...These damn things are as complex and fascinating as girlfriends! I'm gonna have to get another. Hone. Don't tell the wife.

@ deighaingeal

The BBWs are not used for building, they are too soft. It is the rocks between the veins that are used for building. The veins are not more that 10% of the rock and of that 10% only 10% can be used for hones.

Originally Posted by Kees

@ deighaingeal

The BBWs are not used for building, they are too soft. It is the rocks between the veins that are used for building. The veins are not more that 10% of the rock and of that 10% only 10% can be used for hones.

That is why I specified blue rock, not BBW. It is also why I specified that they avoided the veins for the fact that they were weaker.

-G