King Deluxe 300: What kind of binder?

[Knife2meatu]

King Deluxe 300/400 and Neo 800 are all vitrified alundum (AlOx) stones according to Matsunaga, so that's that for this discussion I suppose.

That settles that, then.

I can't remember ever seeing anything indicating that vitrified bond stones could be damaged by submersion in water -- Hence, based on what I think I know, I assume there should be no way that prolonged soaking should damage the King 300.

In light of this, I'm really quite surprised at how very different it becomes after permasoaking for a while.

It showed much more change from permasoaking than other stones. Notably more than Cerax 320/1k/6k/8k; King 800/1k/1200; Imanishi Bester 220/700/1.2k; Sigma Power Ceramic 120/1k/2k; Norton India coarse/fine and Crystolon coarse/fine -- among others.

 

[Barclid]

I can't really speak to that other than that "vitrified" doesn't necessarily seem to mean vitrified in the strictest definition of the word when it comes to sharpening stones. It seems it just refers to high-temperature baking. See below definition for vitreous ceramics from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrification

I'm far from an expert on ceramics, but that definition is certainly more narrow than the spread of what we see being called vitrified in the world of sharpening stones. See: Cerax 1000, Norton Crystolon, King Deluxe 300/400, etc.