Waterstone dreams----- new "locals" and an old Japanese natural asagi kerasu sharpening stone?

It is the beginning of February and (Gasp!) we have snow! On the Oregon coast, go figure. This all makes makes me think of Rudy of Geological Specimen Supply, down in the California desert......

I keep going on about the ODC nagura that I use with nearly all of my sharpening stones. Yesterday I even used it with one of those India/Crystolon combo stones that I am getting from my friend Brandon and it caused such a notable change that I will be doing a separate post, just on that combo.

But for the record.....

tuff - UNIT OF 5 STUDENT SPECIMENS of a very pure lithified white volcanic ash (ODC NAGURA!)

shale - hand specimen of a tan, siliceous, Miocene shale

I tried this, but it was a bit hard and my sample ended up fracturing. These are stones, after all.

The fragment worked great with this super hard chisel. That was WITH the ODC, though.

I also got a sample of welded volcanic tuff..... Interesting stuff.

Variable, pretty fast, and looks a lot like......

This is a photo from Tanaka Kiyoto and his AMAZING blog. To paraphrase, these are from different regions, but the center stone feels like tuff, while the ones on either side feel like sandstone, and the stone compare to a #400 grit. It turns out that a fair number of Japanese waterstones are volcanic tuff. Cool!

Here are some stone samples that I hope to try out in the near future....

siltstone - teaching hand specimen of a gray Miocene siltstone 

VERY fine grain abrasive, might be too delicate?

-------SANDSTONES-------

If natural sharpening stones have one area that they do poorly in, it would be for coarse grinding. The rough stones have the reputation of dishing badly and being SLOW, SLOW, SLOW...... Is this REALLY the case? Coarse is a very relative term, but I am thinking of the #400-#1000 range. I have been using this sandstone that I grabbed off of the beach.... and the more I use it, the more I like it.

It feels very soft for a stone. Smooth, yet has a good crunchy sound, and is surprisingly resistant to dishing. About as good as my King 1200 synthetic, anyway. It IS kind of slow, but not as slow as you might think, is not muddy, but it feels like it would dissolve if you left it in the water bucket, so water control is important. I use it right after the King 1200, even though the grit is more coarse. It leaves a nice, shallow scratch pattern that is very easy to erase with the next higher grit, UNLIKE the K1200. When the weather breaks, I need to find a wider one.

Rudy has some interesting looking possibilities....

sandstone - teaching hand specimen of a medium-grained yellow-brown sandstone

Looks like any number of coarse Jnats that I've seen.

sandstone - teaching hand specimen of a fine-grained tan sandstone 

Ditto.

sandstone - teaching hand specimen of a fine-grained arkosic sandstone 

VERY familiar looking, Kohzuke or Tajima perhaps?

shale - student specimens of diatomaceous shale UNIT OF 5 SPECIMENS

LOTS of the better performing/faster Jnats are diatomaceous shale/slate.

yellow ochre - set of 5 tubes of this natural pigment

Natural pigment!

I have been so pleased with the results that I have been getting with relatively local rocks that I start to think, "Why use Japanese naturals at all?"

!!HAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Last night.......

Not much to look at and hard to tell the true color, but it appears to be a very light asagi blue. About 210-70-45mm or so.

A full skin (kawa) back, black with brown (or maybe just rust staining) and a hint of black kerasu. Kerasu stones have the reputation of being very strong sharpeners. 

45mm thick! And even! This looks like unsold merchandise from an old Japanese hardware store and may never have been lapped. Patches of kerasu?

It looks to be a very fine grain composition and when I look REALLY close, I think that I can see very slight fractures of the working surface that you will see on some really hard stones before they have been polished. Think of very slightly translucent marble, if that helps. You can also see the tell-tale marks from a 1/4 sheet sander! This seller seems to hit all of his tools with one to "freshen" them up *sigh*. It doesn't seem to hurt his sales any, he is a real nice guy, very responsive, and ships super fast!  japan-treazures 

This stone reminds me of some pictures of other stones that I've seen.... Old Nakayama storm cloud asagi kerasu, blue ghost kerasu... 

Interesting, but none of that really matters, these are just names to me. These are just dreams. What WILL be interesting is how the stone works. That is the realty. 

Next week.

Time is on my side - petrified wood sharpening stone

So, since I've recently been working with Sheetrock, plaster, and tape, my poor little brain has been getting all twitchy because a few days have passed without me sharpening anything.-- *sad*--

I had heard somewhere that you could use petrified wood as a sharpening stone. Hmmmm......

The small piece was a test and.... it actually did something! Go figure. It is no surprise that it would scratch the metal since petrified wood isn't actually wood at all, but more of a wood shaped piece of quartz. The process is called permineralization and the Wikipedia gods will tell you all you need to know about that. I, on the other hand, can tell you how to sharpen a chisel using a fossil. Maybe I can contribute an entry?

Anyway, what surprised me was that the scratch pattern was actually fairly even with a slow, but respectable, rate of metal removal. It even felt like a sharpening stone. Decent feedback, a tendency to"squeak" and grab-the-earth at times, and VERY little slurry production because the stuff is pretty hard. That said, it only took me about 15 minutes to turn this chunk of fossil into a sharpening stone.

I polished the flat grain face to 1200 grit and when I get around to it, I'll stick it onto a piece of stone to anchor it.
While not the fastest stone around, it is definitely a keeper. My wife's grandfather picked it up who knows how long ago, so it has history in more ways than one. And it looks cool!


How did it work?

We'll start with the Frankenstone (3000-5000)

Too hard, needs slurry.

DMT 1200 diamond nagura.

Black swarf ( it's working!)

Not too bad...kinda slow, but pretty smooth, some scratches but shallow.

Not a full mirror, but close. Definitely shiny steel and some superficial shine to the iron/jigane.

Control/reality-check. Ozuku asagi. Faster, smoother, and only the finest of scratches. Perhaps not a fair comparison?

The green mystery inkstone. This feels very similar in use and the scratch pattern is similar. This IS faster, though.

Let's mix it up even more. I'm going to try using the P-wood with the ODC nagura.

Faster metal removal, smoother action and just all-around easier to use. The ODC gives a nice even matte finish to the jigane. I like that.

Still WAY better. Ozuku asagi w/ODC. Faster, smoother, easier. Nice definition. 

Well, you can't have too many sharpening stones. This was just sitting in a shoebox and, surprise surprise, it works like your average super-hard Japanese natural waterstone. Not the greatest, but definitely interesting. I looked at some other pieces of petrified wood at a store in town, most of which looked like rocks. Agate or something. This piece is probably an example of incomplete metamorphosis and still looks a fair bit like wood. A conifer of some sort.

When I first got interested in natural sharpening stones, I thought that they were very rare and special (well, the best ones ARE!) but it turns out that the darn things are everywhere. The trick is to first learn how to use natural stones and having a "real" sharpening stone will help. That way, if you are having problems, you will know that the fault lies with your technique. The stone is a known quantity. The second thing would be that a nice stone makes sharpening fun ( well, some of us are easily entertained....), but a bad one will keep you from ever learning anything because you won't use the darn thing. Then you're back to the whole dull tool situation. Also, as you get better, your preferences and priorities will change, so don't sell the farm just to buy into some system. Ebay is full of "systems" that someone else outgrew. At the least, buy used and let someone else pay the depreciation.

I wish that I had learned some of this stuff sooner.

Frankenstone!!! ( broken Tsushima waterstone repair)

Merry Christmas!

It was the week of Christmas and I really needed to get some things done. Why do we wait till the last minute for so many important things? I had gotten two old chromolithograph prints for Renee about three months prior, intending them to be Christmas gifts. It's not like this was a last minute purchase or something, but I DID need to make some frames. That WAS last minute.

I bought these 100 year old prints from Rudy at Geological Specimen Supply and they are soooo cool! Thanks Rudy! He sells through Ebay as nightlights42 and is absolutely top notch. Buy stuff from him (and he sells rocks, too)!

My *ahem* medical condition makes travel a bit uncomfortable (and I hope to be able to use that excuse for as long as possible!), so while my family was away on Christmas visiting family, I had other projects in the works.

Remember this?

These bits and pieces of rock are actually the remains of a large Tsushima black nagura waterstone. They were evidently mined from an underwater mine (really??), years before and have some nice attributes (very fine, even grain with no inclusions, medium hardness and good slurry production) and some not-so-nice (a pronounced tendency to fracture being most notable). This was from the last of a large lot of Japanese natural waterstones that Ebay seller stellers_j has been auctioning off for the last 6 months. If the pieces were 40mm cubes, the bidding would have gone higher because then they would have been in a more recognizable form/size. Full size stones sell for $200-300, 40mm cubes for $30 or so. As it was, I was the only bidder, go figure......

Most, but not all, of the pieces are there and the breaks are clean. Perfect for Super glue! It's funny, I used to hate this stuff, now I use it all the time. Maybe they improved the formula or something. Anyway, it is dirt cheap, flows into thin cracks by capillary action and does a good job of sealing end grain and hardening wood. The loctite was a "plan B" and was not used because the super glue was....

Super!

Not bad! 5000 'ish and very smooth. Definitely a keeper.

Depending on the porosity of the stone, you may have uneven wear at the adhesive seam line. That is the case with this stone, but it's not bad at all. The are a few chunks absent and it would be nice to add some sort of filler to balance out the shape, otherwise the top third of the stone couldn't be used very effectively.I had the plan of filling in some of the missing areas with an epoxy/something blend but after performing a few different tests using epoxy and silica thickener, wheat flour, and pulverized ODC nagura respectively, I decided to go a different route. The epoxy+additive was just too rubbery feeling and wore WAY differently from the real stone. Sacrificing one of my synthetic stones would be one option. Or.....

We have a number of these sandstone concretions laying around the yard, and I found one that was about the same grit and density as the black tsushima nagura. It even had a fossil snail shell in the center! A little bit of artful carving, using the diamond wheel grinder and some 5 minute epoxy (harder and more brittle than the good stuff, perfect for this function)........

 Ladies and gentlemen..... *scary music*...

FRANKENSTONE! Oldschool fossil style. Top.

Bottom. Three pieces were added here.

The line in the middle is from the burnishing action of the epoxy, kind of like a leather strop. Black tsushima nagura finish on the left, fossil sandstone on the right. Almost identical. Amazing.

The wear rate is similar, with the sandstone being just slightly softer, and both produce slurry. The black tsushima slurry is smoother, also more abundant. The sandstone FEELS slightly rougher and sounds different in use but finishes almost identical. No scratchy bits *touch wood*.

The epoxy filled areas are thankfully minimal, although as time goes on I'm sure that voids will appear. I did spend a fair bit of time fitting the pieces. It would have been preferable perhaps to just cut flat-plane surfaces, as this would have been faster and more efficient and also resulted in the thinnest possible glue line. It wouldn't look as cool though and this whole project is the antithesis of efficient, so there. The feel of the epoxy is mildly annoying, but for this price I have no complaints. Just use it like a normal stone and hope that the neighbors don't show up with torches and pitchforks, screaming for blood.

_________________

Even though this stone is now all shot through with glue lines, the stone type is still fragile. This would be a perfect candidate for a string-wrap, as are many other aoto's. Give me a few days to enjoy the fossils before I cover them up. I'll take pictures.

Rockin out at the beach!

Still lookin.....

Beach rocks, Ona beach, Beaver Creek, Oregon coast.

5 rocks, good lookers all....

This is familiar by now. DMT XF diamond to start.

30 seconds using a diamond nagura slurry to start yields.... Not much. Some polishing action.

Different stone, same result.

This one seemed to work well. I lapped 2 small areas to test.

Last stone and the most likely looking one..... and the worst performer. The slurry is light in color because the particles are not abrasive enough. There is no metal in the slurry to turn it dark. Just stone particles.

So I went back to the best of the bunch, lapped a larger section and worked for about 2 minutes. What happened?! Almost no action and sloooooow! You can see a bit of slurry developing.

As a control, the GSS hard gray shale. 30 seconds, full even scratch pattern. FAST! I love this stone! Soooo easy.

As usual, most of the stones that I selected are too hard and don't release their particles fast enough. I think that I am subconsciously choosing the stones that I WANT to work.... "If this one works, I'll have a lifetime supply!", that sort of thing. Still, it's not like I am just picking up any old rock. These are songs that look and feel right, but obviously there is still a finer quality, something that still eludes me. I did notice that none of these stones gave me that gritty aluminum foil tingle that I am beginning to associate with good performers, even though they ARE gritty and have small quartz particulates that are visible using a hand loupe lens. Funny/strange.

Still, it's fun to go to the beach and NOT look at the ocean. I never noticed how many people are out there looking for stones. They are the ones that look at you out of the corners of their eyes, thinking that you must be stealing all of "their" agates.

Addendum.......

So one week later, I keep thinking...."But what about that....". So. Grabbed 2 more.

A small remnant of a too fragile stone but....

It worked quite well. T=30 seconds, made it's own slurry and felt like it was working. Looks very scratchy, not sure if it really is, though.

This MAY have been the parent rock, the composition seems similar. Not at all like the other stones that I see at the beach. Elongate crystalline structure... trying to recall geology 210.

This didn't work as well though. It felt slightly sticky, a nagura might have helped. Maybe another day.