Thread: Water Quality

Originally Posted by Brontosaurus

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I'm viewing it more along the lines of viscosity and would be interested in altering distilled water's pH to see what happens. However, that might risk to damage synth stones, no?

I would advise againt alkaline or acid solutions. A lot of soft or medium to hard bound stones can be damaged that way, and fast. And once the acid is in the stone you can not quickly neutralize it. For every stone you have to seriously look up all available information of the manufacturer. If that is not available, look for user experiences. If you don't find any, take it as a general rule that only hard ceramic bindings can be inert or at least react so slow, that you can stop you experiments before the stone is damaged.

Try glycerine solutions, alcohol, solvents, soaps, simple green. But do not experiment on expensive stones. Maybe a cheap chinese one for starters, Taideas an WeiWei work with oil, soaps, glycerine although i am not convinced that alkaline or acidic solutions are the clever road to begin. Many users in the knife sharpening area like to experiment with their own mix of oil, detergent and water. Test it with oil stones or a cheap chinese one. If you like the viscosity and feel and it works for you in terms of costs and prevents to much cleaning of the stone afterwards, then fine.

But never try this with the japanese stones first, most of them will not tolerate any experiments. If you use oil you will mostly be lucky if you have to flatten the stone half a millimeter to grind away the oily part. Soaps work slower, and remember, only hard oilstones can be boiled and be cleaned by solvents completely. I don't know if even a Taidea would survive boiling in one piece.