Thread: Chinese hone with slurry stone disconcerting?

My normal routine includes honing through my Chinese natural at 200-300 strokes.

On a wild hair, I whacked off a chunk of the stone and polished and beveled it all up to make a slurry stone. Made a milky slurry and honed an old test razor for 30 on slurry and 50 on the clean backside of the stone. While all the tests prove that the job was successful, I can't shave with it until tonight for the ultimate test. Even at 100x magnification, everything looks great.

The part that I find disturbing was that the slurry feels like gritty sand while I'm honing. It felt so gritty that I was sure that I had pooched the edge on the blade. To top it all off, the slurry stone left scratches all over the hone. Is a creamy feel over a slurried stone the wrong impression I was expecting, or is there something wrong?

Here is a bit of reading on the PHIG

http://straightrazorpalace.com/hones...nese-hone.html

We all say this many, many, times but sometimes it takes a second look at something before it really sinks in

ALL natural stones are not created equal. even stones from just a few feet down the quarry can be very different from each other...
This is the "Nature" of the beast,,
Some of the PHIG's are quite scratchy, others are so smooth that you would think it was a Escher, some slurry up like a velvet dream, others become sandpaper on the edge, what you get is what Mother Nature tosses your way..

Alright, I got it figured out <stupid me> I lapped it through to 1k and it works just fine as I had imagined that it would be. I think that the grit I was feeling were some wet/dry particles that weren't washed off the hone after the first lapping at 220 DOH!

Or that too LOL