4 Attachment(s)
"Light Green" (Escher) hone care/maintenance (and need to find a slurry stone)
For the record, I'm a woodworker, not a stropper (shaver? shavoir? stroppetteer? how do you guys refer to yourselves?).
So I was at one of the antique tool sales that takes place a few times a year in my area (yeah... probably not going to reveal that just now, per the below...), bidding on a few things I was interested in. One of those things happened to be an old cast iron file handle (you should always put a handle on your file; those pointy file ends can really injure the palm of your hand if you're not careful and slip while filing; I've seen photos and it isn't pretty. The cast iron handle can be quickly changed out from file to file and feels vrrry nice in the palm of your hand).
Unfortunately, the lot immediately before it (a beat up old sharpening stone I never even glanced at before the bidding) didn't even get one bid, so it got thrown into mine. Ugh. I hate buying junk.
Later that night, though, I looked at it a little more closely and decided to see how it cleaned up. I ended up with this stone...
Attachment 107519Attachment 107520Attachment 107521Attachment 107522
If you separate out the two, I ended up paying $375 for the stone.
Oops. Forgot the decimal point.
It was $3.75.
(Seriously, didn't know what I had until I started researching it. Here endeth the gloat.)
(And... it appears I have a piece of grit sticking somewhere in my DMT 220. :( That bugs me to no end...)
So, anyway, it looks like I found myself a 8x2x1 Light Green Escher in the wild. Nice thickness, very minimal chipping, labels somewhat intact.
I use Norton 1k/4k stones for most of my woodworking tools. On my planes, I take the edge up to a 8K Japanese stone (nothing worth mention; it's a man-made stone from the woodworking store, came with a small nagura slurry stone); everything else is generally fine with a 4K grit edge, though. Unfortunately, several of my plane blades (namely, my 2 3/8" wide blade for my 604 1/2, my primary smoothing plane, which is the one that needs the keenest edge) are wider than 2", so I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of the stone, but that is yet to be evaluated.
I've never had such a quality stone in my shop before; not really sure of the best way to care for it. I want to make sure I either a) maintain it properly for my own use or b) don't bugger it up in case I decide to sell it. So here are my questions for the rabble:
- Best way to preserve the labels?
- Best way to flatten? (I have several DMT stones; as mentioned before, it looks like my 220 is holding some grit somewhere, so I'll have to sort that out. But also open to sandpaper and float glass or... whatever.)
- Better to sharpen with slurry or without?
- Best way to raise slurry? (Can do it easily enough with the DMT 220, but... that seems excessive)
- Best slurry stone (if raising slurry is the recommendation) and best place to get one for my new stone?
- Current market value? (more for adjusting my itemized list of shop equipment for insurance purposes, not for sale purposes)
Ummm... I think that's it for now. (But I reserve the right to ask more questions later.)
Except that I will now start paying closer attention to all of those beat up looking sharpening stones I see at auctions in the future.
Any information anyone can provide on the above questions would be most appreciated!
Cheers,
Ethan