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Favorite non-Japanese natural stones?
- Thread starter GorillaGrunt
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Belgian Blue - I have three coticule/bb combos. 2 are glued and one is natural. It is my all-time favorite stone.
There is some more info and pictures about my coticules in @inferno 's razor thread here.
https://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/threads/lets-have-a-new-razor-thread.43148/post-670538
Back before the pandemic and I traveled to see family and friends a couple of times per year I would take a couple of these guys to hone up people's knives. Rub them together for slurry. I still don't think any natural stone I have tried is suitable for coarse knife work but this piece of Belgian Blue comes the closest. I can raise a real burr with it even on softer steels. It cuts edge bevels great. I don't have any exotic supersteel knives and neither do any of my friends and family. But I will say they work great on cheap stainless, vintage carbon, white, blue, vg10, 52100, etc. If you finish with some propylene glycol or mineral oil and real light pressure you can get a real shiny finish akin to about a Shapton Glass 4k. Here is what it looks like dry. Those scratches are from a diamond card I hit it with. It had some gunk on it.
Here's another shot of the polish job. If you really worked at it and built a nice slurry you can up the polish game considerably. But with some good firm pressure and some saliva (thanks for the tip @Benuser ) the Blue can cut like a coarse stone. This one, on both the blue side and coticule side is exceptionally fast. I have handled a few dozen of these things and not seen another close to it. You can see the nice uniform coarse scratch marks.
The coticule side of this stone is also very fast. It self slurries a lot material but is still some how hard enough to be fairly dish resistant. I haven't used knives on it much but with razors it can do all of the work of synthetics from 1k - 12k in about 50 laps. Even with very hard Swedish and Japanese razors. It is not my creamiest coticule finisher and it is still too slow to cut the primary bevel if there's any damage, but it is absolutely unbelievable at going from a raw bevel to prefinished stage. This is with plain water and no slurry after just a few strokes. There's a lot better pictures in that razor thread I linked above.
And here's some polish shots. Super shiny core. Nice cloudy cladding. I would be using this in my knife progression all of the time if it wasn't my absolute favorite razor stone. The edges are superb.
Those are the last of what I would consider my coarse to midrange non Japanese naturals. I did a couple of finishers too just because I was in the mood.
There is some more info and pictures about my coticules in @inferno 's razor thread here.
https://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/threads/lets-have-a-new-razor-thread.43148/post-670538
Back before the pandemic and I traveled to see family and friends a couple of times per year I would take a couple of these guys to hone up people's knives. Rub them together for slurry. I still don't think any natural stone I have tried is suitable for coarse knife work but this piece of Belgian Blue comes the closest. I can raise a real burr with it even on softer steels. It cuts edge bevels great. I don't have any exotic supersteel knives and neither do any of my friends and family. But I will say they work great on cheap stainless, vintage carbon, white, blue, vg10, 52100, etc. If you finish with some propylene glycol or mineral oil and real light pressure you can get a real shiny finish akin to about a Shapton Glass 4k. Here is what it looks like dry. Those scratches are from a diamond card I hit it with. It had some gunk on it.
Here's another shot of the polish job. If you really worked at it and built a nice slurry you can up the polish game considerably. But with some good firm pressure and some saliva (thanks for the tip @Benuser ) the Blue can cut like a coarse stone. This one, on both the blue side and coticule side is exceptionally fast. I have handled a few dozen of these things and not seen another close to it. You can see the nice uniform coarse scratch marks.
The coticule side of this stone is also very fast. It self slurries a lot material but is still some how hard enough to be fairly dish resistant. I haven't used knives on it much but with razors it can do all of the work of synthetics from 1k - 12k in about 50 laps. Even with very hard Swedish and Japanese razors. It is not my creamiest coticule finisher and it is still too slow to cut the primary bevel if there's any damage, but it is absolutely unbelievable at going from a raw bevel to prefinished stage. This is with plain water and no slurry after just a few strokes. There's a lot better pictures in that razor thread I linked above.
And here's some polish shots. Super shiny core. Nice cloudy cladding. I would be using this in my knife progression all of the time if it wasn't my absolute favorite razor stone. The edges are superb.
Those are the last of what I would consider my coarse to midrange non Japanese naturals. I did a couple of finishers too just because I was in the mood.
The Chinese 12K, aka Guangxi river rock, aka the People's Hone of Indeterminate Grit
This stone reminds me more of a J-nat than any of the others. The arks and coticule families just act fundamentally different to my aoto, aizu, suita, hideriyama, oochi, etc. But this Chinese one feels pretty similar to my hideryiama, even smells a lot like it. Nice earthy muddy aromoa. It is hard but releases some material. I can raise a slurry with tomo or diamond card. I bought it for razors but I actually like it better for knives. Nice tight scratch pattern that with good contrast. Core steel is not super shiny or mirror, but it doesn't look bad.
Vintage translucent butterscotch Arkansas with milled aluminum case.
Another one of my prized possessions. This is my favorite finisher for heavier grind razors.
Owyhee Jasper. This is my favorite finisher for hollow ground razors. It feels like someone took the hardest arkansas stone on the planet and baked it in the center of the sun for a billion years. And it smells like it too. There must be sulfur in it or something. I don't know but when you are using it smells like your clothes after you have been around a bonfire for a few hours. The razor edges this thing generates are insane. The only way I can go up in sharpness from here is diamonds and cbn paste and stuff like that. I don't think it would make much of a polisher though, because I don't think it really removed any of the scratches from the previous stones, it just made them shinier.
In conclusion, After about an hour of sharpening with my coarsest natural stones, I put a nice kasumi finish on the bevels but I did not come anywhere close to fixing the edge damage and micro-chipping that would take about thirty seconds to fix with a Shapton Pro 1000. Coarse naturals have their place in polishing progressions. And I believe that they are excellent at putting different types of finishing touches on edges where you have already done most of the heavy lifting with something else. The Belgian Blue and Coticule is pretty special. Still nowhere near as fast as synthetics, but far closer to anything else I have tried. I would take the edge off of any of these stones for Chef knives except the Turkish oil stone. That thing has not impressed me. I look forward to trying more random unknown naturals because I have an eBay problem.
Great stuff Stringer, Childermass, Inferno et al.!
Something interesting in terms of the ones I have - if I was trying to get a knife as sharp as I can possibly make it (not saying much really) I'd probably use a progression that ends with a slate followed by my Maruoyama Shiro Suita.
When a Nakiri I sharpened the other day managed to cut a hair I had purposefully blunted it earlier to try sharpening on just a slate, no other stone. I think stone 1 in the picture below. My wife then blunted it slightly trying to cut frozen beef (!), so I touched it up on the jnat, and that was when it got to cutting a single hair.
Something interesting in terms of the ones I have - if I was trying to get a knife as sharp as I can possibly make it (not saying much really) I'd probably use a progression that ends with a slate followed by my Maruoyama Shiro Suita.
When a Nakiri I sharpened the other day managed to cut a hair I had purposefully blunted it earlier to try sharpening on just a slate, no other stone. I think stone 1 in the picture below. My wife then blunted it slightly trying to cut frozen beef (!), so I touched it up on the jnat, and that was when it got to cutting a single hair.
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Here's a stone I picked up from Alibaba; it's not the stone i thought it was as i was trying to find a particular one mined in Pakistan but I'm not sure it's from China either. Based on the edge and bevel scratch pattern I'd say it's around equivalent in particle size to an Aizu but faster cutting.
Anyone used one of the jasper or agate ones? I'd think intuitively that that would be a good surface to sharpen on with some nagura slurry but i could be entirely wrong.
PotterMcMuck
Active Member
This is an interesting thread, but difficult to answer because any natural stone, by nature, will be different from any other stone (even from the same mine). And then of course there's the skill of the person sharpening that comes into play (for example, I have a lot of experience sharpening my straight razors, but I'm still relatively new to sharpening kitchen knives). So it's interesting to think about, but not really useful. Experiments can very useful for yourself because they are with your specific stones and knives, but unless someone is going to buy those stones, the experiments don't (or shouldn't) mean a lot to them. But I'm a big fan of thought experiments, so here are my results:
I have a decent collection of razor quality stones (unfortunately, they're mostly razor size, as well), and I've tried to sharpen my knives on most of them, with varying degrees of success. With both razors and carbon steel knives, I start with synthetics finish on naturals. With stainless steel, I usually keep it simple and stick to synthetics (unless I feel like experimenting).
My current favourite knife finisher is a level 4 Nakayama that I originally bought for razors but didn't like the edges it gave - but for carbon knives, it's incredible (in my opinion). I find it's a little too fine for stainless steel, though.
I got good knife edges from a coticule I bought from Ardennes a few years ago. I found it was slightly too coarse to finish razors (maybe 6-8k), but I was happy with the knife edges. Unfortunately, it was a little too small to be comfortable to sharpen knives (6"x1.5"), so I sold it.
I know I tried sharpening knives on my BBW, but I honestly don't remember if I liked the results or not. The only BBW I have is on a natural coticule combo stone that's about 5"x1", so all I remember was that it was too small to be comfortable to use.
I tried a large (8"x3"), slightly coarser (~8k) thuringian slate hone, but found that it was too slow and too fine for knives. I have a couple of finer razor thuris (probably 10-12k), but didn't bother to try sharpening knives with those, I knew they would be way too fine and slow, and also too small (5"x1" and 6"x2").
I have a level 5 Aiiwatani that I haven't tried knives on yet, and probably won't. It's an amazing razor finisher, so I doubt it would be good for knives - I also want to keep it pristine. And I haven't tried my Arkansas stones yet - I just haven't gotten around to it, but I'm curious about the results.
I have a decent collection of razor quality stones (unfortunately, they're mostly razor size, as well), and I've tried to sharpen my knives on most of them, with varying degrees of success. With both razors and carbon steel knives, I start with synthetics finish on naturals. With stainless steel, I usually keep it simple and stick to synthetics (unless I feel like experimenting).
My current favourite knife finisher is a level 4 Nakayama that I originally bought for razors but didn't like the edges it gave - but for carbon knives, it's incredible (in my opinion). I find it's a little too fine for stainless steel, though.
I got good knife edges from a coticule I bought from Ardennes a few years ago. I found it was slightly too coarse to finish razors (maybe 6-8k), but I was happy with the knife edges. Unfortunately, it was a little too small to be comfortable to sharpen knives (6"x1.5"), so I sold it.
I know I tried sharpening knives on my BBW, but I honestly don't remember if I liked the results or not. The only BBW I have is on a natural coticule combo stone that's about 5"x1", so all I remember was that it was too small to be comfortable to use.
I tried a large (8"x3"), slightly coarser (~8k) thuringian slate hone, but found that it was too slow and too fine for knives. I have a couple of finer razor thuris (probably 10-12k), but didn't bother to try sharpening knives with those, I knew they would be way too fine and slow, and also too small (5"x1" and 6"x2").
I have a level 5 Aiiwatani that I haven't tried knives on yet, and probably won't. It's an amazing razor finisher, so I doubt it would be good for knives - I also want to keep it pristine. And I haven't tried my Arkansas stones yet - I just haven't gotten around to it, but I'm curious about the results.
Mathias Z.
Well-Known Member
don´t think that the BBW is different to the normal Coticule. Ther garnets size is a bit coarser and not so concentrated and packed as with the Yellow Belgian Whetstone. But the range exceeds 4000 in my opinion and is more likely closer to 6000. At least the specimen I own. Who cares. Sharp is sharp.
Mathias Z.
Well-Known Member
As for a touch up: Dalmore Blue, BBW, La Lorraine, Washita, Shapton 4k, Naniwa Professional 5k, Turkey Stone, Magog, Hindostan, ... everything that is fast with slurry but does not create a big burr, but only a fine one.
