Tell me pls, if you do like your Tsushima Naguras- i am still thinking, if i do really need also Tsushima. As a JNat fan for sure, but really?? With all the Naguras i have.. No, really, even being JNats nuts
Actually, there's no Tsushima in the photo above. They'd be black. I have a small Tsushima for slurry (not shown in photo) and I've sold a large JNS one on BST in the past. Large ones are very good - uniform, without any problems, harder and so and razor dudes like them I think. But feel is important to me and it wasn't really my cup of tea.
In all honesty, if I knew what progression those stones went in and a little bit more about them I would have been paying attention to and jumping on them, but I dont, and have never met anyone in person who does, so unless I ever get showed in person what the stones mean, they have 0 meaning to me. I do have an ohira suita around the 10k grit level, but I dont even know how to talk about that stone in jnat terms.
I've never really met anyone who knows about jnats, aside from in Japan. True, it does help to be able to try many stones. On the other hand, there's lots to read and videos to watch, and then things make more sense and you develop preferences, etc, like with anything.
Ohira suita - well, suita can all be different from what I know, and so someone would have to judge themselves or rely on another's opinion or recommendation - a seller or more experienced user - or if not just cross their fingers when purchasing. (Ohira are supposed to be pretty consistent in quality, for example, though there seems to be a big price range.) Of course you'd probably use yours as a finisher, and people love fast and fine suita, especially for tools. Is yours like this? A suita would normally have 'su' or tiny holes that would aid speed, even if myself I think 'speed' is over-rated and often sales-speak - though of course a stone isn't good if it's too slow and doesn't cut either.
In my case sometimes I like non-fine coarser finishers for many knives and tasks. 'Aoto' stones, or Takashima or Hakka or Tsushima, etc, should be good for this, and not as fine as your suita. These might not erase all scratches from coarse stones, and so some might want to go finer and do this to get the finish they want. On the other hand, I've received a new deba before with a really uniform but still clear scratch pattern, and I thought it looked quite cool, and so I sometimes don't care about obliterating all signs of scratch, and deba don't need to be so fine. I like to use even coarser stones too, because they feel better to me and are more interesting than synthetics, and can help create nice scratch patterns if you want. In the photo above I've got several that are more on the bevel-setter end, a Natsuya, Iyo and 2 Ikarashi, big and small, which could be used in the space between my coarsest synthetics up to the aoto/etc stones mentioned above. Therefore, with these I can avoid touching any synthetic. :cool2: