Thread: How to know the differences between translucent Arkies

lately, I had a growing interest in Arkansas stones, particularly the Translucent Arkies, when I first bought my vintage Translucent Arkansas I tried to flatten it with a new atoma 400 to break-in the diamond plate and to flatten the stone, the diamond plate broke-in within five minutes, but the stone required 2 more days and the use of a coarse industrial-type sandpaper. So I tell you I hated the thing from the beginning, it's slow it is hard to flatten and I thought it is advocated because the old timers were using it, at the end I used it mostly to produce slurry on the softer stones.
Also I noticed a lot of contradicting information scattered all over the web, about how fine the stone is and how hard it is, but the most confusing subject is lapping; some will say that 325 DMT enough others will take it up to 3k sandpaper or lapping films, I know that natural stones very but, some people made it feel like it's a totally different type of stones, and it was !!!
I realized that, when I bought a vintage Norton Bear Translucent Arkansas I found that the translucency is higher so I immediately thought it is finer than my old one, but shortly I recognized that it is not when I started to flatten it, it was really hard, one of the hardest stones I put my hands on, but not nearly as hard as the vintage one, the Bear stone cuts way faster, but not finer, in my opinion it's 8-10k after lapping it up to 1.5k. At this time my interest in Translucent Arkies grown to the point that I bought a new one of Dan's stone, it was Factory Irregular with some inclusion, but certainly cheaper than their regular ones, anyway I lapped it and started testing it immediately, faster than both Bear and the vintage one, but it was less finer than both.








during lapping I noticed, that the vintage one required the minimum to become reflective, once I finish lapping it with the 400 diamond plate it will start to reflect, but the Bear and Dan's required an annoying progression upto 1.5k to remove the scratches from the diamond plate, the I will rub them against each other with their slurry from the diamond plate to bring the reflection.
Finally, I followed the advice of DaveW to use a Carbon Steel knife to break-in the Arkies after lapping it, then I started to finish my razor on the vintage translucent, it toke me less than 200 x strokes to do so using water only, as the usual no singe of meatal removal was visible appear but it have improved an Escher edge wich was very impressive to me, so a declared it to by my finest finisher ever.

I Tried to take photos of the magnified ( X160 ) bevel using my phone ( it was very default to do so, and resulted in bad images )







So the question now… How to know which Arkies is finer if the translucency is not a factor ? also is there is source of those extra-extra translucent Arkies ?


Thanks.