Thread: Getting Oil off of a Barber Hone

Anyone experimented with a good way to remove oil from a barber hone? I have a beautiful 3 line Swaty here that must have been used with oil. Water beads up and there is a slight amount of metal residue in the stone.

I've got a few others similar to this. Soaking in a solvent maybe?

Thanks,
Tony

I would try scrubbing with good dish detergent, and that would be all...

Maybe you don't want to mess with kerozine and stuff like that, it might melt the hone??

Or, you can simply continue using very light (mineral, sewing machine?) oil...


cheers,
Nenad

dish soap and hot water......

Maybe Acetone or Avio gasoline, or trieline.

Since those are ceramic hones, i dont think that organic solvents ruine them

cheers

The problem is those hones are porous so it will have absorbed the oil and all the scrubbing in the world will not remove it. You need to soak it in some kind of solvent maybe a long time, like days and there is still no guarantee you'll get it all off. I think ideally a steam treatment might do it but you'd need a machine to do it.

I'm new to most of this, but I know there was a recent post (in the last month) where a similar topic was discussed...it seemed like there was a consensus that once oil is used, you have to stick with using oil b/c it's almost impossible to get out...probably b/c it is so porous.

Hopefully you can find a way to get what you want...sorry, no ideas from me!

Probably no help but...I have removed oil stains on the concrete driveway with engine degreaser, it worked very well.

The Orange / Citrus based cleaners work great with oil /grease, that may work for you. Works wonders on my Bar-bQ

Strangely enough, using a shaving lather and honing a razor with it does a surprisingly good job of getting the crud out, the vacuum behind the bevel as the blade passes over tends to make the lather really foam up at the surface of the hone, and this seems to lift the oil and metal and any other accumulated crud off the hone. When I've done this on old barber hones (even ones that didn't use oil) I've been amazed at how gray the lather gets after a few minutes; these old hones tend to have a *lot* of crud embedded in them.

I recently had the same problem with an Austrian Apart hone (which I think is very similar to a Swaty).

I just used mild dish soap and a nail brush (anything that can give you a bit of a scrubbing action but won't affect the finish of the surface should work) and scrubbed for several minutes. Its not perfect, but it made a big difference.

I don't think you can get all the oil out of a hone unless you use a solvent - possibly under pressure (a steam cleaner might work - if you have one). But you can clean off most of the oil residue to the point where the hone will work with water/lather.

You might want to clean it and then let it sit for a couple of days to see if any more oil leaches to the top of the stone - and repeat the cleaning process until the leaching stops - just a thought - I only had to clean my hone once.