Other abrasives? (ideas/comments)
Having read through many of the amazing articles on honing and stropping in the library here I was thinking about some of the less orthodox abrasives I've seen mentioned. Things like newspaper, ash, chalk, and so on. It lead me to wonder if anyone has ever made an effort to compile a list of such things. After all if you want feedback on honing on a Norton stone, or stropping with diamond paste or crox it's simple enough to find it. However if one wants to know about people's experience with things like ash, newspaper, various types of rouge and other less common polishing compounds it's a little more difficult.
Simply put I'm looking to get feedback and comments on peoples experience with more abstruse or unusual abrasives. As well as hopefully getting comments about peoples experiments with other, perhaps heretofore unmentioned methods, products, and so on.
To provide an example the other night my wife had been filing her nails and left a rectangular, four-sided nail buffer on the table. I had just been thinking about honing and stropping, and when I saw it I decided to give it a shot and see how it performed. I didn't have a razor I was willing to try it on, but with a knife blade the surfaces of the abrasive pads wore away quickly when I tried to hone with it. Even so they gave results. More than that the two softer, polishing surfaces were so interesting to play with I'm going to buy a few of these and see how they work on a razor-blade as they really did polish up the knife edge brilliantly, even in my amateurish hands.
That made me wonder what else I could try, and I promptly thought of an abrasive polishing cloth (a jewelers cloth) that I had. I'm thinking of tacking, sewing or otherwise fixing it to a length of glass or tile and try honing/stropping with it. I can't claim either of these are great ideas. I'm nowhere near experienced enough to gauge the results in contrast to the many different means of polishing and the like, but experimentation is always fun.
Anyway that's enough about my experience. I'm really more interested in hearing about other peoples finds, or attempts to use some of these less talked about things. That, and how they feel such things stack up compared to more common approaches.