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This one will be on the way soon, vendor’s images. The first karasu that I’ve bought in a while.

Rosy hard full bench kiita, maybe 5/5- in yesterday from Japan. Fitted stand, and apparently a great razor finisher by this morning’s shave. It was shipped DHL Express, and arrived in about 1-1/2...

Just in yesterday, a bench stone on a fitted base. It’s as fast as an Okuda suita and the shave this morning was like shaving with your finger. It cuts SLD steel well, and it’s 40mm thick and it’s...

Really beautiful Joseph.

Beautiful pure stone, just lovely. I recognize Alex’s products!

That’s a beauty Joseph! Is it hard, soft, in between.... ?

I have a couple of new ones from Alex Gilmore, the large koppa is mine and I’m trying out the smaller one. Both are deep layer stones, the large is a Nakayama and the smaller one probably is too,...

Yes, that clears it up. I bought the stone off a Japanese auction, the description for almost all stones are the same, ‘Look at pictures, no return’. Lol.

The colors/patterns like kiita, asagi,...

I don’t understand the first question. The stone that I cut is pictured. The second tomo on this page was always a tomo, I didn’t cut it. Hardness of the first set is about normal for a razor...

Just to add a footnote, here’s a tomo that’s broken along one of those familiar jnat lines.

Here’s the stone with my pencil line transferred to the back in red Sharpie, the stone will be face down on the saw table and I need a visible guide on the back. If you look closely, you can see the...

OK this is going to be a really arcane post, or series of posts about cutting jnat nagura from a larger stone. The first question is always ‘why would you cut up a perfectly good jnat into smaller...

Here are a couple of new acquisitions, the karasu arrived Saturday and the butterscotch kiita on Christmas eve. They’re both razor grade but I’m still evaluating them of course. The kiita is a darker...

If a jnat edge is aggressive you can usually fix that with heavier slurry. I have 2-3 stones that make very smooth edges, but if you’re not careful shaving, they like to give you a little ‘love bite’...

I don’t lacquer the ones on fitted bases. None of them have ‘features’ that sealing lacquer are really needed for, and as you know, the good bases are quite tightly fitted. I usually take mine out of...

Thanks Alex, I’ve also found that many stones on the fitted bases are better, they don’t have layer cracks and they didn’t go to the trouble of hand fitting a base unless the stone was good. Some ar...

Here’s a nice kiita with an iro streak down the middle, pretty good razor finisher too. Stones of this quality on fitted bases are getting scarce.

The ‘grand prismatic Nakayama’!

Everything that Stefan said is 100% true, but let’s also remember that when your old soldier lapping plate will not cut it anymore (pun intended) it’s just beginning it’s life as a slurry generator!

I use w/d sandpaper on a piece of plate glass. I don’t like the scratches that even the 1200 Atoma leaves. A mellow DMT 325 works well but sticks to the stone badly.

If you use a diamond plate,...

There’s no real website or book that does that definitively, partly because many of the signs or ‘tells’ were common to more than one mine. It wasn’t a big place. All of the eastern mines, the ones...

Those stones with a pronounced ‘bubble’ structure of lighter material with yake around the bubble is a tell for a Nakayama or a close by mine - it’s what’s caused the yake pattern in the harder...

The kiita question raises another, is a grey stone with little or no blue asagi? Asagi means blue of course, mizu asagi is ‘water blue’.

First is a mixed stone that I got from Takeshi back in the...

I think what’s a kiita depends on if you’re selling or buying Oz! Lol. Here are 4 examples.

The left stone is a rich orangish-yellow Nakayama koppa from Alex Gilmore’s ‘hoard’ stones, the second...

Jerry, the ring pattern and the namazu (catfish!) lines are Nakayama ‘tells’, some other nearby mines had them too so these signs aren’t conclusive, but there’s a high likelihood that it came from a...