Wabisabi-Ken
Well-Known Member
Thought I would write this up as an insight for anyone interested in natsuya stones. I had recently met a Japanese friend in Kyoto with multiple jnats and was able to go and have a play with his collection, I was very impressed with his grey natsuya speckled with white dots. It felt nice, worked quickly and left a nice contrasty finish with barely visible scratching. So naturally I got on the hunt for myself..
I managed to acquire my first Natsuya which came rough cut so I went to work flattening it all out.. to my surprise it was a beautiful kind of speckled creamy white to orange gradient. I was used to seeing more creamy brown striped natsuya which to be honest I wasn't fond of in the looks department so this was a cool surprise. I was even more surprised when I used it, it seemed to work quickly generating dark swarf with minimal mud. It definitely seemed harder than my friends natsuya as I recall that self slurrying reasonably easily.. after playing around with the stone a bit I can say it seems quite versatile. With a 400 atoma nagura slurry it can create a darker kasumi with slight scratchiness, you can then work that a bit more to get a lighter contrast without visible scratches. I noticed that after working the stone you can get a burnishing effect also which gives a nice shine on the clad steel and core steel. It's definitely fun to see how the stone and blade reacts differently to different techniques!
This guy measures in at roughly 80x65x215mm and is around 435 mm3/g so it sits at 3.5/5 in the hardness range.
The stone as it arrived
And after flattening out
The results
Sorry the phone camera photos aren't great, I'm getting a macro lens soon so I can really show some detail!
I haven't actually sharpened any knives with this stone yet so I'm unable to comment on the cutting characteristics! I'll get into that later whenever I have something I need to sharpen.
I managed to acquire my first Natsuya which came rough cut so I went to work flattening it all out.. to my surprise it was a beautiful kind of speckled creamy white to orange gradient. I was used to seeing more creamy brown striped natsuya which to be honest I wasn't fond of in the looks department so this was a cool surprise. I was even more surprised when I used it, it seemed to work quickly generating dark swarf with minimal mud. It definitely seemed harder than my friends natsuya as I recall that self slurrying reasonably easily.. after playing around with the stone a bit I can say it seems quite versatile. With a 400 atoma nagura slurry it can create a darker kasumi with slight scratchiness, you can then work that a bit more to get a lighter contrast without visible scratches. I noticed that after working the stone you can get a burnishing effect also which gives a nice shine on the clad steel and core steel. It's definitely fun to see how the stone and blade reacts differently to different techniques!
This guy measures in at roughly 80x65x215mm and is around 435 mm3/g so it sits at 3.5/5 in the hardness range.
The stone as it arrived
And after flattening out
The results
Sorry the phone camera photos aren't great, I'm getting a macro lens soon so I can really show some detail!
I haven't actually sharpened any knives with this stone yet so I'm unable to comment on the cutting characteristics! I'll get into that later whenever I have something I need to sharpen.
my first one I did by hand and concrete block then atoma to finish it off. It was a long process
