Many thanks for opening this new thread!

[soatoz]

I would very much like to be the first guy to post an article here!

I will get ready with couple of articles and post them as I finish.

But for now I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for opening this new thread and I'll try to make it worth while.

Peace

[willie]

Thanks also.

This section should be a good idea.

I have a question for soatoz regarding his post on sharpening stones. I hope it's not too dumb.
What is likely to happen, when a beginner who is not used to hard natural water stones, uses them?
For example, a person gets a nice edge happening on the soft natural stones and then moves to a (very) hard one that they have not have experience with.
Will they rub away with nothing really happening?
Will they wreck the edge they have created? (wear it away? round in off?)
Hope you can see what I'm wondering.

[soatoz]

Thanks also.

This section should be a good idea.

I have a question for soatoz regarding his post on sharpening stones. I hope it's not too dumb.
What is likely to happen, when a beginner who is not used to hard natural water stones, uses them?
For example, a person gets a nice edge happening on the soft natural stones and then moves to a (very) hard one that they have not have experience with.
Will they rub away with nothing really happening?
Will they wreck the edge they have created? (wear it away? round in off?)
Hope you can see what I'm wondering.

Hey Willie!

Okay! Let us make sure that we are talking about "VERY" hard stones.
9 or 10 out of my scale. Nakayama or Oozuku have the reputation to produce the hardest stones. (But not all of them are hard. Some Nakayama stones could be quite soft. But Oozuku stones are usaully very hard.)

Basically, what would happen to your edge is, that it would be scratched very baddly, and these scratches would be readily visible with your naked eyes, even when it was perfectly hazy without almost any visible hairline after finishing it nicely with your soft stone. If the bevel is scratched, the condition of the blade would be similar or even worse than when it was polished using a #8000 synthetic stones.

If you are using a honing guide, as you might have already read in my sharpening stone article, the bevel would be scratched all over, the iron as well as the steel, and you'd have to go couple of stones back to erase those scratches. So personally I think hard stones are not suitable for honing guide sharpening.

There is another reason why honing guide sharpening is not suitable for the finest hardest stones, that I haven't explained in the sharpening article. If any tiny particles that are not washed off from either your hand (including between your nails) or your honing guide falls onto the stone, that would cause a severe scratch. It wouldn't be as disasterous if the stone was softer, because this particle would partly get absorbed by the stone itself, but still it would scratch.

If you are hand sharpening, only if you think you are in level 3 (please refer to the sharpening article) you are ready to learn how to use the hardest stones. This is not just my personal oppinion, but any experts would say the same thing. So until you can at least stick your plane blade (if not your chisel) to the stone, as shown in the photo (again, please refer to the sharpening article) it is better to stick to the softer stones and try to master flat sharpening. That would make the learning process more fun.

For using harder stones, you need to own couple of other stones to dress the surface. Nagura stones can be used for mid hard stones, but when it comes to the hardest,,, you cannot use Nagura stones, because even the very fine Nagura particles are larger compared to the finest hard stones. Also you cannot use Naguras for Suita stones either, because the holes in the Suita stones would trap the larger Nagura particles and these keeps scratching the edge. This knowledge is I think not too popular even in Japan. So, some Japanese might argue and say "whaddya talking about??? you ain't know nothing about Japanese stones!" if you told them this. This is kind of a secret technique... I can tell you this far, but for how to dress the hardest stones? Get some expensive hard stones from me and I'll tell ya! Nah, just kiddin, I'll write about it sometime, or I get loads of requests.

There are so many thing you need to learn and master in order to bring out the performance of the hard stones. But it might be interesting, for those of you who are curious, to see how different it is when the stone is harder. Even if you are comfortably sharpening on a soft stone, you might feel that your skill level has suddenly gone down, once you switch to harder stones

Lastly, if you think you are having no problem using hard stones, check the tip of the blade with x200~x300 microscope. If the tip is perfectly straight, you are master of sharpening!! but if not you should be happy that there is still a bit of room for improvement!

===

This kind of specific question is always welcome!