Thread: Fun with 200x Microscope & cell phone camera

So today I got 2 Arkansas stones in, a Best Brand soft and hard:



As you can see these 2 are very similar in color. In order to be able to tell the 2 of them apart, I nibbled at one of the corners of the Soft Arkansas. I checked them for flatness and to my surprise they were already just as flat as I would get them if I lapped them myself. Score one for Best brand hones. I did lap the surfaces a little bit with the DMT only to prepare the surface. The edges of one side are beveled, the other side are rounded.

The Gold Dollar is the guinea pig for this hand shaking experiment, and water is the medium of the day. I chose The Gold Dollar for 2 reasons - 1 I don't plan to shave with it anytime soon and 2: I used it to cut things I shouldn't have and it needed bevel work anyway. I opted to compare these 2 to the Norton 1K because soft and hard hones are on the low end of the scale. No point comparing them to 8K, and both should be a degradation from 4K. As before the pictures are at about 200x magnification. Anyway, without further ado, the Gold Dollar edge after setting the bevel on the Norton 1K:



There's a lot of scratches for the camera to refract off of, so I really had a hard time getting a half decent picture. That was about the best I could pull off. Well, onward we go, to the Soft Arkansas:



To my surprise, this is an improvement over the 1K, the only way you can tell is the presence of more blue fuzz (flat steel) than white fuzz (scratches). My Photography needs more work than my honing. I was honestly expecting same performance or lower. I didn't really count exactly how many strokes I did. I kinda did the same thing I usually do, a set (ball park 20/10/5/3/2/1 back and forth passes then 10Xs) of 'heavy' strokes, a set of medium strokes, and halfway through the pass of light/no pressure strokes the blade started to stick to the hone. At that point I did 10 X's and stopped because it probably wasn't going to get any better. Then I moved on to the Hard Arkansas:



Same method as the Soft Arkie. But this time it took many more passes to feel a change. It started to get a little resistance after 2 'heavy' sets, then I lightened up to medium for 2 sets and it was feeling pretty sticky. 2 more sets with little/no pressure and it was feeling sticky like the Soft stone. Again, 10 X strokes and that was where I stopped.

My honest assessment is that I was surprised. I thought for sure I would be lapping the stuffing out of these. Again all they really needed was a little surface prep, 20 figure 8s with the DMT each just to get the surface where I wanted it. When I saw 2 (mostly) white stones I thought they had screwed around and sent me a pair of Soft hones. I know all grades have color variations, but the vast majority of Hards that I have seen are grey or black like the one I use for pocket knives. But it is an improvement above the Soft stone, and for a roughed up surface I think it did very well. I'm pleased with the pair of them. The way it pops hair off my arm I almost think I could strop and shave comfortably off the Hard stone.

At some point I may burnish the sides where I rounded the edges just to max out the hones for kicks and grins if nothing else. But first I think I'll do a little coticule slurry bevel setting experiment just to see what happens.