Green UK stone

Another hone picked up off Ebay. I'm thinking Llyn Idwal or Charnley Forest - what do you think?

It is a very hard stone. Took a while to lap it flat, leaving a white/green slurry.

It is a striking, light, pale green with dark green veins and dots throughout. One end has a pink colouration and a possible pyritic inclusion, which may also be in one of the veins.
There are sparse reflective sparkling particles embedded in the material, which only show up when held up to the halogen light in the bathroom - consistent with other UK hones I have (Tam o Shanter, Charnley Forest/Llyn Idwal).

I've not seen another stone like it.
Dimensions are 9.6 x 1.8 inches.

It had been covered in old oil residue and indeed, using WD40, it was a very smooth hone that eventually produced very fine, cloudy beige slurry. A very slow, cutter, hardly removing any metal. Many laps were required to get the slurry to darken.

Produced a smooth, semi-polished edge, that sliced chin hairs off, dry, without little pull.

Not tested it for a shave yet - maybe tonight.

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That looks very pretty. I'm afraid I am not qualified to say anything else about it. Just that it's very pretty and I want one. Thanks for posting.

Doent look like any Charnley I have seen.

I have not seen one like that either. However ther supposed to be lighr green colour hone for final polish and is called Cuttlers Green. If it is one then you have hit a jack pot.

It is not a Charnley. I hope it's a good finisher for you.

Not a Charnley and doesn't look like a Lynn Idwal either. I've seen heavy inclusions like yours in Turkey Oil Stones before, but can't remember the color of those. I do recall that they were fairly decent finishers though.

No, it's not a Turkey stone. I have, and have seen hundreds of them(Turkish oilstones) Extremely fast but not the best of the best finishers. It doesn't look like anything I have ever seen, although it has a faint pattern of the Idwal stones, but those veins are confusing. It could be an Idwal or something from the same quarry, but since nobody knows how a cutler's green stone looks like, you can say you have one and so far, nobody can say the opposite :p

It looks more like a Tam to me. Never seen a CF like that nor does it match any description of a cutlers greenstone I have ever seen. If the strata cracked after hardening and the lines were infiltrated with something else that flowed into them, which hardened over time, then that could give this sort of result.

I had one like that, but only a corner of it had that type of veining, although what the next hone along looked like beggars the imagination. Here is the one I am talking about - it is quite variegated in nature, but what natural processes were about at the time of first deposition, during the main body of deposition and at the end of deposition can only be conjectured. I would imagine that most extreme examples would come from near the beginning and near the end of deposition:-

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Some parts of it looked a bit like the more extreme examples of LI, but it did not hone like an LI (or what now seems fashionable to call a 'grecian' although I doubt the stones ever left the British Isles, much less took up greek residence) - it cut like a Tam.

Regards,
Neil

It has been confirmed that the Grecian hones are from the same Llyn Idwal quarry, nothing to do with Greece, the name was a trademark or something like that. We have to find some old miners of those mines, they will be able to answer us many questions, assuming that they are alive. I didn't had the chance to use a TOS hone, are they hard enough to be compared with the CFs and LIs as the above? I suppose there are variations, but I don't think they are so hard, green colored, fine-slow and big as this one. But of course I can be wrong, and you have more experience than me.

This stone of mine looks like yours. It came with 2 lightgreen Llyn Idwals (like the Grecian and Neil's ToS) and two darkgreen LIs, a big one and a slipstone. The speckles don't match any of them but I suspect it still is some type of LI.

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It's about time someone takes a picture of a confirmed Cutler's Green.

Btw wai, I looked again at that other stone of yours and I'm leaning towards CF now but I'm not sure. If you post it in the Hones forum or in this thread maybe some of the others can figure it out :)

As far as "confirmation" goes, nothing is confirmed unless it is supported with hard evidence - like paperwork from the time and the name of the quarry involved. Anything less than that is just supposition as far as I'm concerned.

The stone I showed pictures of was nowhere near as hard as an LI, which is why I leant towards ToS having had a lot of experience with LIs. It did not have a glassy quality that many LIs have, nor any inclination to the percussion-bulb type of fracture that you often associate with LIs. However, in a world where a minor jumbling of ingredients results in something other than the original it may well have been a 'type' of LI, a type of LI that did not give the same sort of edge refinement as you would associate with LIs but more in line with ToS and a degree of hardness that you would associate more with a ToS than an LI.

As far as variety goes in the ToS line, I have seen 10" plus long ones, almost white ones, grey ones, greenish ones and decidedly blue ones. The white ones can approach 10k or so, while the majority fall in around 7k to 9k. LIs would be almost on a par with CFs, certainly exceeding 10k and more like 12k - 15k. Those are conservative estimates, and only apply to 70 - 80 examples I have made tests on. I suppose a certain amount of information could be gleaned by specific gravity measurements, which I intend to pursue in the future. With a known SG one could at least work out the novaculite content.

Regards,
Neil

Beautiful stone

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Originally Posted by episaacs

Beautiful stone

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I agree - that is certainly a beautiful stone, Wai, whatever it is.

Regards,
Neil

I'm sorry, yes, there are no hard evidence about them, at least that I'm aware of. The specific gravity is definitely a good test for confirming their composition. . For the lime containing stones (thuringian?), a good way of identifying them is using a strong acid and check for bubbles of CO2, and depending on their composition there are ways of identifying them. Gemologists have most of the basic equipment for the more complex tests including specific gravity, and they don't charge much.

I contacted the seller and he said that he believes the stone is from Wales.

The wooden box base is marked 'W Mortimer' on 4 sides and I'm told this indicates that it is a good quality stone. It is presumably not the name of the previous owner.

The seller owned and used the stone many times for sharpening carpentry tools.

looks like a Llyn Idwal to me

Indeed a beautiful stone and not one I have before seen. It resembles a Turkey Oilstone although the colour is wrong, while but for the veins it looks akin to a stone in my possession which I believe is a Greican per a thread you may have seen posted in the last fortnight. Greicans allegedly are Llyn Idwals ("LI") and while I have suspicions that Cutler's Greens ("CG") may also be, I have no literature to support either concept.

While a 'Douglas Oilstone' owned by Shooter I believe, was likely to have been a LI and later shown to be but identical to a Greican; it may be that the same is true for the CG, ie. there may have been one single area or slab within the LI quarry with unique characteristics similarly to veins of coticule at Ardennes, that was named 'Cutler's Green.' Again I have no literature to support such a hypothesis, however given that there is not one conclusive sample, it is not unforeseeable that this was the case.

Back to the OP; I agree with Neil Miller that this does not match the description of a CG but I disagree that it looks like a Tam, notwithstanding similarities despite the difference in colour between the two. I would be interested to read about its performance. Invariably some will acknowledge that stones look different at hand to their appearance in photographs and this again will make a difference to what opinions you may have received if the stone were at hand compared to samples of known identity.

Thank you for all the kind and informative comments!

When dry and under normal indoor lighting, it is a darker, dare I say, forest green. It really is a beautiful stone and not a bad performer.

It certainly produces a smoother edge than my CF/LI and Llyn Melynllyn, looking at it under 40x magnification.

A test shave (without stropping) was just about tolerable.

Sorry, The stone looks like a Fiddich river stone! See: http://straightrazorpalace.com/hones...id-please.html