A comparison between the purple and greenish hones from the Tri Hone set
There has been much talk about the stones in the Welsh Slate Tri Hone Set available on Ebay, and I have been in contact with the seller AJ to talk about the naming of the stones, how they are sourced and how effective they are.
He asked if I would like to do a direct comparison between the Green stone aka the Welsh Thuringian and the Purple one aka Llyn Melynllyn and I said I would and that I would post my findings be they good and bad.
First off I lapped the stones, they were very close to being totally flat so it wasn't a big job. I took them from 240, 400, 600 wet and dry and also did the slurry stones.
http://i44.tinypic.com/1kjsn.jpg
To test them I took an ugly razor, but one that takes a good edge, and put it through the same progression
1) Dull razor on a bottle so that it doesn't shave arm hair.
2) Use the 1000 grit side of my King combo to reset the bevel
3) Move to the 6000 grit side 20 laps on slurry, dilute & repeat, then rinse the stone and do 40 laps on water.
4) Move to Welsh slate that I was testing and do 40 laps on slurry, dilute and repeat, then rinse the stone and do 80-100 laps on water.
So the 1st thing to note is that there was very little difference in the edge that the two stones produced. Both provided a great shaving edge, which was both sharp and smooth there was very little resistance in the 1st pass and the coupe de maitre was very comfortable (which I always think is a good indicator of the sharpness of a blade)
Of the 2 the Welsh Thuringain (to use the nickname) seemed to be marginally better than the Llyn Melynllyn but only just. In comparison with my usual finisher (Naniwa 12k) I would say the green was about the same maybe a little better and the purple was close but not quite as good. The Naniwa obviously wins on the amount of work needed to produce the edge being much much less, but I was surprised how good the stones were.
Quite a personal thing as well but I preferred the feel of the WT while honing it seemed to give me more feedback.