Thread: Can I pick your brains?

It looks like a "fine India" stone to me. The "India" stones come in different grades and the older ones are better quality.

The marking in the side "FINA" is Italian and Spanish for fine.
From memory they usually come presoaked with oil from the factory.

Try water first. If you get a scummy mess forming on the surface while your sharpening then it probably has too much oil in it.

I have always wondered if you could soak your stones in hot water for a few days to help pull the oil out of a stone.

Unless they come in the box or they have markings on them you are generally buying a lucky dip. That's not a bad thing at all. Just keep playing around with it and you will soon find out where to put it in the order you sharpen.

If that stone had been used with any sort of oil, no water would stick to it.
A good scrub with water (+2 drops detergent/liter) might be useful, might be only cosmetic.

If you wanted to get oil out of the stone, good luck. Boil/simmer the stone until the pot is soft enough to eat. You would have to displace the oil with detergent-laden water and I'm not at all confident that a good result would happen = some lingering oily spots, some water-soaking spots = crappy imtermediate.