Thread: So how bout them Arkansas' eh!

Can we see a picture? The are nice things . I use a black one sometimes. I have a couple of them. Ive got a small white slip stone . The Black one that is flat is slow going and hard. And leaves a mirror finish. Natural oil stones are very nice. Ive got a couple of Charnley forest and a few other types of Oil stones that I picked up from Camberwell market in the 80s.

There it is. They're faint in the pic but the machining marks are still prominent by eye. Not seen much work at all.

Thanks. It looks good .

I don't use a Arkansa stone but do use a natural stone I "suspect" is Turkish oilstone, particularly for precise flattening the backside's edge of plane blades.
Raise a slight slurry with diamond plate to speedup the cutting. I also a small have a small remnant stone I use as slipstone.

Your stone is a beaut.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

I guess the question though is: does anyone actually use them to put that final edge on their chisels and such. It was nice but it felt like it was a very slow process with it.

Grind and hone before you get to the fine stone and work only the very tip of the edge with it with some pressure. It'll actually end up being faster than using a jig with a "fast" cutting fine stone, as well as being tolerant of anything you put on it.

If I'm using a finish stone, it's generally going to be some sort of arkansas stone like that. With touch finishing the apex of a tool, it can be finer than something like an 8k grit waterstone. if you're used to using guides or honing a whole "pane" of metal in a secondary bevel, then it's going to be a no-go.

Those stones do their best work when you set up the prior work so that you have a few degrees of room left for the edge finish and work only the tip. The sky is the limit with natural stones if you have time, but the process I described is good for a 20 second process on the finish stone.

here are some pictures to gawk at.

An 8k grit waterstone that's that's got a little bit of its own loose grit running around on the surface (just what they do).
https://i.imgur.com/vyk9GHp.jpg

Purple slate with a slurry to set up a razor bevel to be finished:
https://i.imgur.com/3aBtECa.jpg

A razor on purple slate (same cutting speed and about the same finish as a translucent arkansas).
https://i.imgur.com/b67wN96.jpg

And a dan's black ark (as fine as your trans - not all black stone are, but the firsts and seconds sold by dan's are). On a tool. This is the 20 second thing.
https://i.imgur.com/O4Th2Tx.jpg

The purple slate illustration is important in that it gives you an idea of the range of a single stone used two different ways. The light pressure and longer duration of honing that you'd do on a razor is not really practical in a shop, but you can still adjust pressure and area honed.

To do this stuff well is not difficult, but it's an art lost in a world where the gurus teach one way to do things so that beginners can feel good about the class and buy the next class.

(i find the dan's black to be better and faster to use day to day than any 8000 waterstone, and it's finer working as long as you focus the work where it needs to be done and at an appropriate pressure level - which is more or less firm and lightening up with the last few strokes. In my opinion, using the fine stone at the same angle any other stone was used is a terrible idea, but it's everywhere and opportunity is lost to do less work to get better functioning tools).