Thread: Vintage Thuringian

Hmm, I do see that I've been a little redundant; touche and woops!
???To save you from me talking myself in circles??? All I will say is I think it's a yellowish stone that makes the steel not hurt my face and once I post pictures if anyone with experience can possibly verify my assesment of colour I would appreciate it.

i cant speak from experience .. but i cant wait to see your stone !!!

I have 5 eschers...All of different color.

I have one that isn't labeled but is one of the yellowest hue stones I have...I bought this stone from a rabi butcher in Isreal. It was humped in the middle so I feel it wasn't used on razors. I flattened it except for the very ends of the stone that aren't really used anyway and sence it was 8 inches long I figured it would show that amount of hump it had. Now, This stone won't slurry even using a rubber from a stone labled Escher that Lynn once owned and changed hands several times sence lynn had it. It does however produce an excellent edge with water only. This stone ha the best draw of all my stones but it is about 2 and a quarter inches wide so that alone might be the source of the additional drag or draw. It realy acts like It is slurried...

Ok...that said I bought another hone from the same rabi and was labeled and also humped in the middle. This stone had a low spot at one end which I left when flattening. It slurries well with my usual slurry stone but doesn't finish any better than the unlabeled one.

I have been messing around with all these stones and comparing the finish with each using the same razor.
This has been bothering me for over a year and am about to give up on analizing it and just use it...
Stingray

When I was just dipping my foot into the Escher waters, I asked Lynn Abrams and Tim Zowada which of the colors they favored. Lynn said there were subtle differences between the blue/green and yellow/green and that he favored the blue/green. Tim Zowada also favored the blue/green at that time. Tony Miller used to sell Thuringans and occasional vintage Eschers. He discontinued selling the Thuris because his supplier, across the pond, couldn't maintain a supply of quality stones without inclusions.

Tony told me that Rabbis would come to him for stones for the kosher butchers and that they were solely interested in yellow/green stones. Nothing else would do. So that was the extent of my early investigating on these stones. Soon I acquired some of each color. I stuck with labeled Eschers, not because I thought them to be better than unlabeled Thuringans, rather because I wanted to know what I was getting. I didn't want to be in the position of those j-nat collectors who are paying big $ for stones without always knowing for sure that the stone is the real McCoy.

Cutting to the chase, I like yellow/green stones the best but blue/green is very good too. I cannot prove it but I think the yellow/green cuts faster, while still very fine. I've had a Y/G that had the yellow/green end label on one end, and the same label on the other that said, "guaranteed soft." Indicating a faster cutting rock AFAIK. I had a light green and it was very good too. Sham said his was faster than Y/G. I like a blue/green and I've kept one and go to it from time to time. Appears to me to be slightly slower than the Y/G but , as Lynn said, the difference is subtle. The end result is the same IME. The dark blue is IMO, harder and slower than the others. I had one and sold it to a guy in Europe. It was a very good stone, capable of extremely fine finishing IME, just more strokes to get there.

It is worth noting that the catalog pages that have been printed with prices on the Eschers show the Y/G the most expensive followed by the Light green, blue/green and dark blue. There must have been a reason for the price difference based on the characteristics of the hones differentiated by their color. It wasn't for beauty of one color opposed to another. OTOH, I suppose it could have been for the scarcity, but I still think efficacy was the determining factor. Rare alone isn't worth much if the object isn't intrinsically desirable.

Bottom line , as my grandma used to say, "Handsome is, as handsome does." So whatever the color of a hone, it either delivers the goods or it is no better than a paperweight.

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

When I was just dipping my foot into the Escher waters, I asked Lynn Abrams and Tim Zowada which of the colors they favored. Lynn said there were subtle differences between the blue/green and yellow/green and that he favored the blue/green. Tim Zowada also favored the blue/green at that time. Tony Miller used to sell Thuringans and occasional vintage Eschers. He discontinued selling the Thuris because his supplier, across the pond, couldn't maintain a supply of quality stones without inclusions.

Tony told me that Rabbis would come to him for stones for the kosher butchers and that they were solely interested in yellow/green stones. Nothing else would do. So that was the extent of my early investigating on these stones. Soon I acquired some of each color. I stuck with labeled Eschers, not because I thought them to be better than unlabeled Thuringans, rather because I wanted to know what I was getting. I didn't want to be in the position of those j-nat collectors who are paying big $ for stones without always knowing for sure that the stone is the real McCoy.

Cutting to the chase, I like yellow/green stones the best but blue/green is very good too. I cannot prove it but I think the yellow/green cuts faster, while still very fine. I've had a Y/G that had the yellow/green end label on one end, and the same label on the other that said, "guaranteed soft." Indicating a faster cutting rock AFAIK. I had a light green and it was very good too. Sham said his was faster than Y/G. I like a blue/green and I've kept one and go to it from time to time. Appears to me to be slightly slower than the Y/G but , as Lynn said, the difference is subtle. The end result is the same IME. The dark blue is IMO, harder and slower than the others. I had one and sold it to a guy in Europe. It was a very good stone, capable of extremely fine finishing IME, just more strokes to get there.

It is worth noting that the catalog pages that have been printed with prices on the Eschers show the Y/G the most expensive followed by the Light green, blue/green and dark blue. There must have been a reason for the price difference based on the characteristics of the hones differentiated by their color. It wasn't for beauty of one color opposed to another. OTOH, I suppose it could have been for the scarcity, but I still think efficacy was the determining factor. Rare alone isn't worth much if the object isn't intrinsically desirable.

Bottom line , as my grandma used to say, "Handsome is, as handsome does." So whatever the color of a hone, it either delivers the goods or it is no better than a paperweight.

Actually the boxed stone mentioned above in reply number 13 is the stone you bought from lynn and you sold it to j.Benson. It has a good home. It cost me an arm and a leg but I don't walk that much and I can always get someone else to turn the pages.
Stingray

He is one more thing to consider. I have been playing with my new microscope a lot lately. What I have noticed on finish hones is, the type and quality of the lapping has a far greater effect on the edge than does the color of the Escher. The difference between a hone lapped with 400 grit Silicon Carbide, and one lapped with 2000 grit Silicon Carbide, is amazing.

Someday, I will kill a week and do a real study on this...

Originally Posted by Tim Zowada

He is one more thing to consider. I have been playing with my new microscope a lot lately. What I have noticed on finish hones is, the type and quality of the lapping has a far greater effect on the edge than does the color of the Escher. The difference between a hone lapped with 400 grit Silicon Carbide, and one lapped with 2000 grit Silicon Carbide, is amazing.

Someday, I will kill a week and do a real study on this...

Please do!
Now I lap my Thuringens on the DMT 325 and then Thuri to Thuri, I still find they get finer if I run some old razor over them with a little slurry.

Originally Posted by Tim Zowada

He is one more thing to consider. I have been playing with my new microscope a lot lately. What I have noticed on finish hones is, the type and quality of the lapping has a far greater effect on the edge than does the color of the Escher. The difference between a hone lapped with 400 grit Silicon Carbide, and one lapped with 2000 grit Silicon Carbide, is amazing.

Someday, I will kill a week and do a real study on this...

I do remember someone, think it was Glen, talking about this and how he didn't really see a difference?
I used to go to the 1200dmt after lapping to polish the surface of hones with no real difference in final product.
My apologies for not getting a picture up last night, was crazy busy. It's my 4th anniversary tonight so what better night to guilt SWMBO into letting me fool around with the camera and a rock

Congratulations! I can think of a lot better things to do on an anniversary than playing with razors...

The differences due to lapping may mean nothing in a real world, practical sense. But, under the microscope at 1200X, they are there. Another reason may be in how the hones are used. I use mine purely as a "finisher". I do not expect to move any real amount of metal at all. It is the very light, final touch, before stropping.

A 1200 grit DMT is still a very coarse lapping medium as compared to 2000 grit Silicon Carbide. Using a slurry also makes the hone far more aggressive.

I was just trying to interject that how your prepare the surface of the stone is far more important than the color. You can prepare an Escher anywhere from being a pretty good metal mover, to doing almost nothing. It just depends on what you want the stone to do, and what you expect from it.

I still see no pictures of your stone!

Well I think the main points have been already mentioned here. But let me add and highlight some points concerning thuringians again.

I think I mentioned a few times already that the Escher company did not have own quarries for thuringian waterwhetstones, even not in the 19th and the beginning 20th century. When you study the rent-list of the quarries from the beginning of mining in 1806 you will not find an Escher name on these lists at all. In the later 20th after WW 1 the Escher company or the follow-up companies like Bösenberg&Trinks rented some mines, but at this time the high times for thuringian waterwhestones have already been gone.
The Escher company bought the stones from the whetstone makers who rented the quarries.

Means - the quarry of the Escher stones is the same quarry from what the other thuringian stones come from. There is no special Escher quarry for the waterwhetstones!
So if you have an unlabeled stone it could be absolutely the same quality than an Escher labeled stone.
Looking at the thuringians I have in my collection there are of course differences in quality. But I do not have one Escher labeled stone that is of less quality. Means the Escher company watched carefully about the quality of the stones they sold and therefore it is up today a quality sign if you get a labeled stone! But an unlabelled stone could be as good!

Thuringian waterwhetstones are slate stones or more precisely clay-slate (in german “Tonschiefer” – I don`t know if clay-slate is the correct geological translation).
These slates consist of quartz –which is the abrasive material, clay and mica (glimmer).
The colour of these slates is determined by the amount of clay and the trace elements in the clay.
The amount of clay also determines the fineness of the stone concerning honing. So the more brighter the stones are (going more to the yellow green side) the stones are getting finer and smoother (because of the clay) in general.

The most thuringians I have in my collections I got from old barbers. The barbers most of the time got minimum 2 hones in the size of 8 to 10 inch. Also mostly one of the stones is on the blue side, the other one on the yellow-green side.
When I talked to the barbers or mostly today -the children of them- they always told me that the yellow-green stones have been chosen for the endfinishing (“…my father at least did a few strokes on the yellow-green stone then turning onto the leather strop…) whereas the blue stones were used to do the main work on the razor.
My personal experience is that there is quite a clear difference between the dark blue stones and the yellow-green stones. All other stones in between these colors -which are shades of grey- I cannot mention a real, appreciable quality or smoothness classification within the minor color changes. Some stones are better, smoother or finer than others – of course - they are natural stones.
I also got a labeled blue-green stone that beats some of yellow-green ones in smoothness.

In the later 20th century there have been mined other stones which are also dark blue, but looks more like the typical slate. They look like the hones the Müller/ Dictum company sold some years ago and which were said they have been mined before WW2.
These stones - even the ancient ones- are clearly of less quality.
In the old literature you found, that in the 1930’s some companies looked for other quarries which were easier to win than the old quarries which slowly died. I think these stones are coming from those quarries that were opened to win “cheaper whetstones”.


Looking forward to see your stone….