Thread: Twilight hone

I would suggest 70 laps was about 65 too many for a razor that was already giving you an "incredible" shave

Originally Posted by onimaru55

I would suggest 70 laps was about 65 too many for a razor that was already giving you an "incredible" shave

That was the point. In order to have a legitimate, standardized test of this stone I had to take a nicely sharpened razor to it. If it got better, or stayed at the same sharpness then the stone is a nice finisher. If the edge turned to crap, then it's not. I'm not saying it's impossible to overhone on a finisher, and maybe I did. But now I have a more definite answer as to what I can use this stone for. I will probably take that razor back to my Chinese and get the edge back to perfect, then try maybe 30 laps on the unknown stone. I also need to try to set a bevel with slurry I suppose, darn .

I disagree with your theories. I think if the razor got better it was not optimal pre test. If it stayed the same the stone did nothing. If the edge turned to crap it is a coarser stone than the previous finisher or you ovehoned. I may be wrong but consider these other possibilities in your experimenting . Good luck

Originally Posted by onimaru55

I disagree with your theories. I think if the razor got better it was not optimal pre test. If it stayed the same the stone did nothing. If the edge turned to crap it is a coarser stone than the previous finisher or you ovehoned. I may be wrong but consider these other possibilities in your experimenting . Good luck

I'll get behind that if it got better the pretest was off, and if worse it was too coarse. Not sure about the stone doing nothing though. I mean, it did something so I suppose I don't have to worry about that!

Most here think it's a BBW because it looks like a BBW despite it not being the same color as your other BBW and gives purple slurry. BBWs are so common that the chance of a stone like that being something else is very small. If you show us a close-up of the stone without slurry this time I expect to see a BBW pattern.

I think 70 strokes on the stone was just fine for a test, most natural stones are slow on water. Without having any magnification you can also compare how polished/shiny the bevel is before and after honing.

With the stone being most likely coarser than your Guangxi I doubt the stone can be a Fox or a Vosgienne.

Btw what size it?

Piet, it is 2" wide, 1.125" thick, and 8.75" long. Here is as close of a closeup as I could get. You can actually start to see some of whatever is making the stone slurry purple. It doesn't have the wood-pattern that I have seen on various bbw's. If it is a bbw-type stone, I wonder where exactly it could have come from, and what was it sold as? The wood box it came in had "J.H. Day" stamped into the wood. Ring any bells anybody?

You're right, it doesn't have any kind of BBW pattern I've seen. I compared close-ups of a few of my stones with my USB microscope set at 10-20x and I couldn't find a match. It does look somewhat like my DT up close, but not a match.

It doesn't look that fine.

Btw there are sparkly Yellow Lakes.

This sure looks like a couticle to me as well and mine gives a purple slurry on the dark side as well; sure looks like a natural combo stone to me. Nice!!!

I have an update as to the performance of this stone. I think with a little bit of technique experimentation I could use this stone as a finisher. It's been a couple weeks since I actually honed with this stone, and I had some other razors lined up for shave tests in front of the two I used this stone with. The first test was to run a slurry dilution on it. I started with a light-medium slurry, 10 strokes then dilute with a spray of water until clear water, then 15 with just water. This gave a tolerable shave, but not the SPECTACULAR!!! shave I was hoping for. The second test I ran was to do a similar slurry dilution, but with maybe one less dilution to get to clear water, and then took the razor to an excellent Chinese finisher (very hard PHIG) I have using a similar slurry dilution scheme as previous. This was the SPECTACULAR!!! shave I was looking for! So where I am putting this stone is in the pseudo finishing category. It is the perfect stone to bridge the gap between my 8k norton (4/8k pyramids) and the PHIG. Whenever the next meeting happens around me (St. Louis area) I will bring this beauty along and we will see what happens.

Andrew

i know this is an old Thread and probably the riddle is already liftet....

I would guess here on a "Rouge Du Salm" special coticule layer mentioned in Henk Bos (Margeja)
Grinding and Honing Part 4, which was mentioned by Henk on Page 48 as

"a very quick kind of BBW (with red tint)"......