The One Stone Challenge

[Sean Hughto]

stone is 8x2x1

[Chris Griggs]

That sure looks like a Washita to me Sean! Nice! That color pattern screams Pike mine.

I wish Norton would reopen that mine.

[David Weaver]

Yeah, that's a washita.

[Jim Koepke]

I haven't been getting involved in this discussion. Thought about it today while working on sharpening a 7/16" beading blade for a #45. I need to get a few more slip stones. Probably 1 each oil and water.

My combo 4K/8K Norton could do most of my blades that are in decent shape. That stone is getting a bit thin.

With oil it seems to work fastest with two stones. A soft Ark and a trans Ark.

jtk

[David Weaver]

I figured I'd shoot the middle of your combination with Dan's and order one of their hards and scuff it up and go from there. We'll see how it works.

Using only one stone makes the process more specific (in terms of what you do and what kind of irons and chisels you'll prefer), but none of the things I've given up (A2, V11, Chrome Vanadium gummysteel) have amounted to any increase in time, I think the opposite has occurred (spending less of a balance of time on the tools vs the amount of time using them).

The shame of it is, it's actually getting pretty hard to find some of the vintage irons in sizes other than 2" for a price cheaper than I can just find a whole plane at a couple of my honey holes.

Stanley tool parts thinks that $11 is a reasonable ship charge on a new one, too, which brings the price to a few bucks short of $30, which is ridiculous. I'd rather just make my own irons than pay that, and making slotted irons by hand isn't much fun.

At any rate, we'll see how shooting the middle of your routine with a newer production stone goes (vs the washitas that handle the routine well without adding a second).

[Sean Hughto]

Thanks for the info. Can one of you aficionados tell us all the Washita bedtime story? In my mind it would go something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a mine in Arkansas (New Hampshire?) that contained unique rocks, ideal for sharpening. Seven dwarves would descend into the mine singing every morning and work all day cutting out 8x2x1 blocks of the precious. On the left side of the mine was a vein of rock they called Lilly White, that was hard and sublime. On the right was a vein of mottled yellowish stone that cut lighting fast and when treated with oil wrung from the bodies of a carnivorous fish common in the Great Lakes to the North was unbeatable. Unfortunately, around the time of the WWII, the dwarves died out, and since no one taller than 3 foot tall can get in the mine, no new stones have been produced for more than 60 years. Many have begun to think the mine is a legend, or that all the magic stones have been mined out long ago, but some believe the dwarves will someday return and ....

But seriously, what's the deal?

[Noah Wagener]

From what I've read about Japanese naturals the particles breakdown in size so you can have a wide range of possibilities. I know you David and Chris have written that a stone polishes finer with no slurry but they seem to say the opposite; that you want a slurry as a buffer so you are not actually contacting the stone at all. And the slurry gets finer and finer. I've seen the magnifications of the razor with and without slurry and it would appear that a clear stone definitely produces finer results. Maybe the particles in a lot of the Japanese stones are breakdown fast. I think at Lee Valley they say the particles of a King breakdown as well so maybe you could use a 1,000 and build a big slurry and just try and slide it along the mud after you have the edge set.

You guys seem to saying that a dense stone that holds its particles is the best stone for this. One that has been broken in (dulled?) In my mind a softer stone would work quicker at the start but i do not know how long it would take for its particles to breakdown to fine.

I messed around with this stone:

Attachment 284107Attachment 284108


It is sold as rough/medium. It raises a big burr quickly and gets somewhat fine edge.

What is happening in an unloaded strop? And why the material for the strop need to have a little give?

tried it today while I was out of home. all I had was a new cerax combo stone 1000\3000 grit (more than enough but no strop). went straight to the 3000, then stropped on my pants (fabric not jeans), got a really good edge, shaved hair (whatever I have left of it) without a sound and a light touch. however if the blade needs a lot of work to get a burr I'm not sure the 3000 has enough cutting power, it's a surprisingly "burnisher" stone, especially considering the 6000 is soft and rough.

Matthew, did you let the 3,000 clog so you could burnish with it. Maybe i do not understand the concept of burnishing. Could you explain that? I think of it as more rubbing than abrading.

cheers

[David Weaver]

It goes like this - somewhere in a single valley in arkansas, perhaps near oklahoma, pike mine owned a claim on stones that are different than any stones anywhere else. They are only in that valley, and they come out in huge chunks (like hundreds or thousands of pounds), different than a lot of the other valuable arkansas stones that come out in bits and bobs, and as someone from dan's told me yesterday, there is something like an 11% yield from the rocks that make trans stones.

Anyway, pike had at least some underground mines, because I"ve seen pictures of donkeys pulling carts. I don't know if all of the good stuff is underground or if some is on the surface, but that's where it comes from. There's still supposedly a lot of it there, but norton owns the claim and norton says it's too expensive to set up an operation to extract more and then have to send the stone up to new hampshire where they process stones and then presumably run it through their vast blob of retailers at $100 a pop.

With some back and forth, it's not like the other miners don't know where the stone is, they just don't have the ability to get it and I don't think too many people outside of the woodworking world know much about it.

When they dug the stone up in the 1800s, and started marketing it in the UK, it pretty much ate the market and sent everything else in the UK out to pasture (the hone slates, the idwals and charnleys (which are novaculite)). It was obviously the dominant do-all stone here, too, though you can find less lovely soft vintage stones.

The rest of the details, we're learning about going backwards (like the fact that there are differing labels on the ends of some stones that have the same label on the back - fine and soft, etc).

In the old literature, it looks like pike sold rosyred/lilywhite, no 1, and no 2s (never seen a no 2). Whether or not the very old stones that don't have a label on them were sold without a label, or if it was just taken off, I don't know (as in, was the stone mined for a while by others or several miners before pike retailed them as very specific grades, or was some of it let out even while pike was mining it and sold with no label, no clue).

You can pretty much spot something from that area by looking at the structure of the stone on fresh ends that haven't been worn in (you can pretty much tell from the surface, too). On a soft vintage stone, the stones look like a collection of particles with space in between them. On the pike claim stones, the "real" washitas, the structure is like a reciprocal - it looks like a structure with empty cells where the grains would be. They are like the reciprocal of a non pike soft.

Toolsforworkingwood sold the newly minted lilywhites up to several years ago, they put them back on the market for just a bit. How well they sold, I don't know. Norton's business model and desire seems to be to push the trans stone, which to me is odd because their trans stone is OK, but Dan's trans is better. Nobody has a soft stone that matches their pike stone, though, but it's esoteric at this point, I guess, when the washitas don't like modern steel and they would cost 4-5 times as much as a simple aluminum oxide stone.

I'm sure there is also a reality check in how many people love the washita. There are enough of us to apparently drive the price up to wacky levels, but if norton put the washita back in production, I'd bet they'd quickly find that they'd saturate the market though the magic of internet forums has introduced an international market for them outside the UK.

You can see that in the UK, they still sell well. Actually, all of the american novaculite stones have always sold well in the UK, even when the pikes had a dip in value here and you could get nice lilywhites for less than the cost of new.

You can see if you can find sales literature on google showing the prices of the old stones, but back in the early 1900s, same as with the premium razor stones, silicon carbide and aluminum oxide stones started popping up at the same price as washitas and eschers, etc, except for perhaps the uncommon types (for example, a large y/g escher brand thuringian in the early 1900s was $7 or $8 - which would be a princely sum now given that would've taken two days' wages from any skilled trade - but their much more common stones, like a blue 1.5x7, which is several lifetimes' razor sharpening for a skilled user - were about $1-$2).

Those stones that were marketed by carborundum corporation (that were corundum or some kind of silicon carbide) aren't worth much now, but they probably took a big bite out of the arkansas stone market back then because they're everywhere.

[Tom M King]

David,
Not being a rust hunter, do you have any suggestions for vendors of new Arkansas stones? I came across this place http://www.naturalwhetstone.com/aboutus.htm
Any comment on their products?

I bought a set from Halls a couple of years ago. The last set I bought was in 1974 from Smith's, but they don't sell them like they used to. Hall's also made a custom set of triangular files for me, and were very pleasant to deal with. The stones are nice, and I'd buy from them again.

My first set of Arkansas stones were thrown out in the yard when a tornado hit a shop I had. The Washita and Soft stones were broken, but I continued to used the prized Washita halves for years until I got around to getting a new set.

Graham, I'm still gonna get that Black stone to you when I get someone to carry it across. Postage comes close to the cost of a stone.

I did the one stone thing, sort of, yesterday. We needed to clean up an old beam, and the iron in the scrub plane was not only dull, but blunt. I ground it on a CBN wheel, and went right to the Norton 8000 stone since none were soaking, and that stone doesn't need soaking. That got it sharp enough to shave with quickly, but since the Diamond Lapping Film was right there-I keep it on the drain board mounted on a 9x12 surface plate. I stropped it on the two finest grits, and polished the back a bit on the film. Total time from blunt to super sharp was probably around a minute.

These days, I only use oil stones if we are on a cold job site, and the sharpening bench is a table saw.

[David Weaver]

From what I've read about Japanese naturals the particles breakdown in size so you can have a wide range of possibilities. I know you David and Chris have written that a stone polishes finer with no slurry but they seem to say the opposite; that you want a slurry as a buffer so you are not actually contacting the stone at all. And the slurry gets finer and finer. I've seen the magnifications of the razor with and without slurry and it would appear that a clear stone definitely produces finer results. Maybe the particles in a lot of the Japanese stones are breakdown fast. I think at Lee Valley they say the particles of a King breakdown as well so maybe you could use a 1,000 and build a big slurry and just try and slide it along the mud after you have the edge set.

You guys seem to saying that a dense stone that holds its particles is the best stone for this. One that has been broken in (dulled?) In my mind a softer stone would work quicker at the start but i do not know how long it would take for its particles to breakdown to fine.

I messed around with this stone:

Attachment 284107Attachment 284108


It is sold as rough/medium. It raises a big burr quickly and gets somewhat fine edge.

What is happening in an unloaded strop? And why the material for the strop need to have a little give?



Matthew, did you let the 3,000 clog so you could burnish with it. Maybe i do not understand the concept of burnishing. Could you explain that? I think of it as more rubbing than abrading.

cheers

I'm not sure I buy the slurry thing with japanese stones. They cut a finer edge on clear water, one only needs to shave with a razor sharpened by them to tell. If there is a magic trick where you have to use them with slurry a certain way to get the slurry to "break down" into little particles, i've yet to see it or a picture of the particles before or after crushing. They cut faster on slurry and that might lead people to think they're cutting finer - simply because they can finish the job on slurry due to their cutting speed.

The finest edges are a bright polish. Period. The super high dollar japanese stones will still leave soft steel or iron just a bit dull, but they will polish the hardened metal to a bright polish. Any of the nonsense about them making a hazy edge that's sharper than a polished edge is poo. There is an in-between where the edges a step below the finest may be fairly sharp and hazy compared to something like a shapton 5,000 stone which polishes without making as fine of an edge as you'd expect for the polish, but the very finest edges are bright polish, natural stone or not.

Same thing occurs with oilstones - if you use one with light pressure on a razor for a few hundred strokes (something you might do once when you first prepare a razor that's not been used in a very long time), it will bring the razor edge to a nice bright polish - more so than tools probably because you can afford to use lighter pressure, and oilstones respond in fineness to pressure very well.

[David Weaver]

Example of soft arkansas that's not washita (ebay).- it bugs me a little that people call stones "pike" that don't have a label. Ebay seems to be full of "escher" stones without a label, and "pike" stones without a label because of unscrupulous sellers who see what sells for more in sold listings. If you buy stones like these, you probably won't get what you expect and you'll be out money when you're honest at sale.

171146925623

Anyway, stone like this will settle in and cut slower, but the edge isn't fine like it is off of a washita. It just never gets there, whereas a washita easily makes a delicate wire edge with a nice uniform dull haze (no deep scratches) that comes off and leaves a nice keen edge.

Example of a stone with color not that much different that is a washita:
261390007167

I hassle Chris G when I find stones like the second one. After I buy them. "hey, look, i found another one!", and the damage lapped out of this one nicely.

It's a good example of the stones that aren't pike label having much more variation than the ones that are. Actually, the ones that aren't pike (or some other woodworkers label) have all been finer. I'd imagine they'd be less desirable to someone working with a grind stone and one bench stone.

Sometimes it's kind of hard to tell if a stone might be a washita or not, and the only way you can really tell is to sharpen something on them. It becomes easy to tell.

Still, like mentioned above, it's a bit esoteric. Do they sharpen an edge as finely as a translucent arkansas that's settled in? no. they really are ideal for a one-stone use, and they make a good soft stone when agitated for someone who wants to use one stone and compound or two stones. Not a good stone for someone who relies on guides, though.

[Tony Zaffuto]

Several comments:

1. In one of Roy Underhill's books, he detailed natural stones in a section, along with "inferring" locations. In the book, he also told of hiking into the site, picking up discarded pieces and finishing them for sharpening. As Roy has showed up at the PATINA gathering (next week in Damascus, MD), if anyone runs into him, maybe he will spill the beans? The last time he was there, he did not have on red suspenders or his trademark cap.
2. Sometime ago, I remember having an emailed conversation with a person from Norton about the Washita stones. He said they has no plans to bring the stones back and that everything the Washita could do their "medium India" could do.
3. I've had conversations with "Dan's" about Washita's and I got the impression if there was an order for a number of stones, they would produce a short run. David - since you're conversational with them, find out size and maybe we could do a group buy?
4. Stay away from low-cost stones that call themselves "Washita's". I picked one up a few years ago that was more a "soft Arkansas" than anything.
5. I'm going to have to dig through my pile of vintage stones, I know I have a couple of Washita's with labels & boxes, definitely a lily white and maybe a #2. I have a couple without labels, that have little apparent wear, but have a pinkish tinge to them - maybe a #2? In fact my favorite bench Washita is one that is pink, but I've always attributed that to a century of loving use by the former owner and type of oil used.
6. I am a confirmed O1 steel fan and have little use for A2 or any of the other more exotics.
7. Maybe we can start a "photo reference" sticky for labeled/identified stones?

[David Weaver]

2. Sometime ago, I remember having an emailed conversation with a person from Norton about the Washita stones. He said they has no plans to bring the stones back and that everything the Washita could do their "medium India" could do.

That's funny!!

[David Weaver]

I have one of dan's versions of the washita on the way. They were clear that it is not going to be like a pike washita. I'd imagine that it will be a coarse soft stone, but it didn't cost that much compared to a finisher, so I figured I'd try to see if it's a good coarse stone. I get the sense that it's a stone they don't sell a lot of, and they don't have access to the pike stones, unfortunately.

Like the places where welsh slate comes from, you can probably find washita material laying around in ark at the pike mine location, but I don't know what the laws are now about it. Welsh slate used to be valueless and the places didn't care if you picked some up and took it (from what I've gathered), but that's changed. I can't remember if they let you take just one, or if none is the rule now. I don't know what's around there (at the pike location) but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "not much".

I'd imagine anything that you have that's pink wouldn't be a no 2 unless it was very uneven. I think the no 2 is probably a stone that's extremely mottled or inconsistent, just a hunch. I have a combination stone that probably wouldn't even qualify as a no 1, but I can't find anything negative about the mottling other than appearance. I'll take a picture if I can. By mottling, I mean expanses on the stone that have no pores.

[Sean Hughto]

Well that's interesting and all, but its got nothing on the dwarves and magic. ;-)

Thanks!