SD-Nat

I said that I was going to post pictures of my SD-Nat today. I don't have much time left! :DHere is a copy of another post on a different thread. Talk about lazy!Bear with me I have about 4 different experiments going on at the same time. Today I lapped a new hone, a SDnat. It is a piece of what i think is shale from a road cut in the Black Hills that i picked up about 10 years ago because I thought it looked cool. I took my experimental razor the Prince to the stone. OK not much better than the 8K norton. Here is where it relates to this thread. I took my C12K slurry stone to it. Nice milky slurry. the bevel turned to a frosty look for a scratch pattern, but it was "duller". 50 or so X strokes. I got rid of the slurry and did 50 or so more with plain water. the thumb pad and arm hair tests indicated much sharper. The frostiness disappeared . I don't know at this time if I was removing the frosty pattern and making the 8k pattern visible or making more 8k scratches.I hope this makes sense. LOLI then did 20 laps on the Crox lightly pasted leather strop, 40 on fire hose, 40 on graphite leather and 40 on plain leather. Good shave!See now why I have to many things going on at once? Not very scientific!I will post a thread with pics of my SDnat tomorrow with some more info.Tim

im interested to hear how this goes.. if only there were more good natural bevel setters. maybe the recent interest in the cretan hones being offered will result in more being quarried and sold. (hopefully the price wont go up too much)

if only i could afford three of every natural i wouldn't even need a diamond lapping plate, as i could use the three stone lapping method. :)

Nice stone! For natural bevel setters, there are good stones. Like the wastila from Finland, a sandstone from Pyrenees, more than a few Japanese, the Arkansas, and many more. The problem is, they cost as much as the synthetics, and most of them are slower. The Cretan hone-Turkish oilstone is the Jack of all trades in the hone kingdom. We have plenty of them here, but I don't see any site that sells them.

Glad to see you're getting good results Tim, there are natural whetstones all around us. We just have to have the passion to look for them. :)