A bunch I have collected during the years. The left half of the loot is kinda goofy. I have found them in Sweden.If there is a particulary stone you wanna look close at I can do that.
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A bunch I have collected during the years. The left half of the loot is kinda goofy. I have found them in Sweden.If there is a particulary stone you wanna look close at I can do that.
Member
Brian.
Thank you very much for the interesting reading material.
Jeremy.
Contributor
What is the big fat one above the round wheel and left of the red box of slipstones? Also where did you get those slipstones?Originally Posted by Jonas Andersson
[OP]
Guest
I'm curious about the big one, too. I recognize most of the other ones.
Member
Here are two pictures of the big stone in the middle. The slipstones are very bad, bought cheap from the swedish warehouse Biltema...
Member
Okay, here's a goofy stone I picked up yesterday. This was the pick of the litter at the bottom of a wooden box with some picked-over, very old, too-far-gone tools. Judging by its companions the assemblage came from roughly 1850-1900. The chips in the stone seemed to indicate a natural hone so I picked it up for a buck. It measures 6 x 1.5 x approximately 3/4 inch and smelled of old oil and battered wooden box bottom you get from flea markets; too dirty to make any sort of identification. When I cleaned it up a bit it had an odd greenish tinge with a sort of rusty-coppery mottling which I took to be residual rust, but on cleaning up one of the surfaces with a DMT, it seems intrinsic to the stone rather than some sort of staining. The diamond plate easily made a fine chalk-like slurry, so it seems fine but soft. So I'm thinking it's actually a Charnley Forest hone until someone tells me otherwise.
photo-8.jpg
[OP]
Guest
I think it's probably a slate. Charnleys are novaculite, and like a less hard arkansas but not so much soft. It looks like a nice stone.
(edit: after a second look, not so sure, it might be a charnley. A lap of the top to clean it off and make it uniform might reveal what it is - I just haven't seen a charnley that dark, more like olive with the dark greens being slate or maybe idwall novaculites - still those being more tending toward a lighter green).
One of the grab-bag sort of joys of old stones is what they smell like. Someone had been using my washita combo with gun oil in copious quantities - it reeked, just like the outers gun oil smell i remember from my youth.
Last edited by David Weaver; 01-20-2014 at 3:47 PM.
Member
Hmm. I can see how the photo would make it seem like a slate, but it has the fingerfeel of the little gray Thuringian I have, and it doesn't have the striations or oleaginous texture of slate. It's hard to capture the green-ness without it being in hand. But if it is a slate, where would it come from?
[OP]
Guest
Anywhere in the UK or continental europe, or possibly the united states.
I haven't used a slate hone from the united states that's thuringian or charnley fine, though. They may exist, but I've never gotten one in my hands.
Any stone that looks like that is a total guess, though (for me). Charnley slurry would be like a light olive color (very light) and chalky is accurate, though the quantity raised isn't quite chalky, more milky.
Contributor
Most of the slates claim Wales or Scotland . Don't know how England missed out.
Member
Heres what I have got on the shelves inside.
Edit---> picture got rotated somehow, I dont know how to fix it.
Group photo left to right top row: an aluminum cased carborundum. the only artificial here; next is a strange natural that looks and feels like a canadian oilstone; a larger green stone that may be a charnley; another canadian; a small tam o shanter; the fastest little natural ive ever had- it cuts like a brand new medium india but its very soft; and two unknown razor hones.
middle is a bunch of hard and soft arkansas slip stones
bottom row- 3 lily whites, a no. 1 washita, and a strange mottled washita; 5 hard arks of different colors; a pile of coticules; and bottom right is a bunch of different slates, some thuringian, some other.
I have used every single one of these stones. Theyre very cool. That being said, I never reach for them. A single Norton 4/8k combo leaves them all in the dust. Big time!
The 2 close ups i need help with- can anyone identify what kind of stone they are?? Specifically the razor hone and the long green one behind it.
photo 3.jpgphoto 4.jpgphoto 1.jpg
Last edited by James Taglienti; 01-20-2014 at 11:04 PM.
Contributor
image.jpgI mostly use waterstones but I picked up these two stones at a antique store today. They felt pretty nice to the touch so I figured I'd give them a try on my O1 steel and see if they are worth a hoot. The jury is still out. The coolest one is the Franz Swaty which is very smooth and appears to have never seen work. It has postage on the box. There's a partial sticker on the side that says Pike but the rest is gone. I figured for $7 I'd grab it and see. The other two seem like finer stones but I'm not really sure. Anyways, that's what I have to show.
USMC '97-'01
[OP]
Guest
The blue hone with the slurry stone is almost certainly a thuringian origin hone. There were gobs of private labels (I'm sure you've seen some of them) and the dark blue and dark grey stones often went to english company or private labels other than droescher. Seems like escher and droescher branded hones got the nice yellow/green, lighter blue, light green etc. hones. I don't know if the difference is or isn't more than cosmetic, i've never used a dark thuri, but I'm sure a skilled sharpener could easily use it to hone a razor as long as it stops releasing particles under razor pressure. I seriously doubt that they would've sold a thuri-type hone back then that wasn't fine, I've never seen any mention of substandard thuri stuff until the MST type thuris came along as modern hones that weren't intended for razors in the first place.
I would be looking around google for a link of the larkin company to thuringian stones, because it would probably zip the value of the thing up to $200-$300 in one shot.
Honing a razor with it would probably confirm that very quickly, but anything made before the 1930s or so probably was intended for professional use and probably came from the thuringian mines.
The other stone might be something charnley, or it might not. Most charnley's that I've seen have a color like that but with some reddish smudges or streaks going through them, but there are charnley hones that are plainer green with no color, and they are 100% acceptable as razor hones. I had one. It was green like that with little specks all over it and no red on it anywhere.
If it slurries harder than slate but less hard than an arkansas stone and it isn't obviously something else (which I don't know what else it would be), I'd suspect something of the charnley types. It definitely looks like novaculite of some sort and not sedimentary.
But that's just a guess from me - I never really dove too far into all of the english novaculite hones because they're expensive and I just didn't get the urge to buy a bunch of them as they are not as easy to use as an escher.
Last edited by David Weaver; 01-24-2014 at 2:38 PM.
[OP]
Guest
A swaty and two vintage soft arkansas. If you're lucky, they're of the washita type, but it's hard to get paid for a washita unless it has a pike sticker on it.
The way you can tell if they're a washita is if you use them for a while and they make an edge that easily shaves hair after a strop. Garden variety non-pike stones never seem to do that for me. I am almost certain the stone one the left is of that type (true washita) based on the surface of it, and the stone on the right may be, too (looks a lot like the mechanics friend variety of washitas).
Three line swaty is the good one to have. Any good razor hone will be perfectly clean like that. Nicks in the side of one are toxic because they will ding up the edge of a razor. One that's lapped is usually lost, too, because they were not the same under the surface as they were on the surface. That one still has one good complete edge left and the surface looks unlapped (resist the urge to ever lap it).
Member
David, remember that razor hone i lapped (and ruined) and then tried to fix with super cut shellac? Its still going strong! I even had it in my truck for a while to touch up chisels at work. Ill never know how fine it used to be, but right now its around my norton 8k. And durable. I thought for sure it would be dead by now. I'd guess that for gentle use with razors it would last until the shellac breaks down, maybe decades
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