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An old coticule trick that worked for me

I don't buy coticules that are hard to get good finishes on.

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How does that work? Are you able to try before you buy? Or, do you know the good ones by sight? I do know La Grise by sight, I own a lot of them. Would I buy another? No.

My first was that vein. It was a hard schlog at first, but I learned it, and was able to learn to go from bevel set to finish on it. And, mine was (and still) is a good finishing stone. You'll get a stellar edge, if you have patience.

But, I have other examples of La Grise that don't seem to be very useful for anything. I have a big hybrid bout 10 that sticks almost immediately even on slurry, and feels very waxy.

Learning on that first La Grise gave me some bad habits when moving to faster stones. Like using too much pressure and too heavy a slurry at the start of dilucot, just in the hopes of speeding things up. I'll confess to ruining a few blades when learning by grinding down the spine while making no progress on the edge.

No luck with Les Lats either. I have a couple. I can get an edge, but would rather go with synths and finish on an Ark than that.

My LV I bought as that vein from Ardennes, and it has lived up to the hype. Would not sell it for anything

I have one I bought from a Gentleman on Etsy, with whom we are all familiar, I'm sure, that I like even better than the LV. It's very hard, but also very fine and responds very well to pressure (it will produce swarf with a little pressure and no swarf without much pressure. Don't know the vein, but it's not La Grise, not Les Lat. It looks kind of like Lv, but has markings that kind of look like faint blue bruise marks just below the surface and a few orange lines. I have a slurry stone that has the same characteristics

If I ever saw one of those again, I'd know it on sight and would buy another. That is another I would not sell.

And just to be clear--I have never sold any of the ones I didn't like. Only a square bout that was too small for my purposes, but otherwise good, and an LV hybrid slurry stone that still had the Ardennes stamp. I just had more than I need. I have a big pile of rocks collecting dust...

In short, I think that you can get most (but not all) coticules to work, but they are not all the same. Some are much better than others.

So, be careful, children...
 
I buy vintages. As I said, while they exist... Hard to use/bad vintage coticules are so rare as to be almost insignificant.

Getting one? Very unlikely. Two in a row? You're the unluckiest guy on the forums. Three in a row? Approaching mathematical insignificance.


Bevel set to finish? Yeah maybe THAT isn't easy on every stone. I assume it's harder on the stones I like best (the finer ones). Don't do that. Single stone honing on a coticule is more of a parlor trick than a practical honing method. Yes you can get away with it if need be, but why? In reality, that functionality of a coticule might be useful if you own one razor and need to do a little heavier work on it once or twice in your life... buying a coticule planning to one-stone hone on it on a regular basis is just gonna be inefficient. Coticules CAN do that, it's still nowhere close to as easy as honing on a 3-5 stone collection of reasonably spaced grits. Heck a guy did it on a Thuri back in the day to prove a point. I have done it on a Surgical Black ark. There are methods to make almost anything work. Because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD. Are there coticules where Dilucot is reasonably easy to do? Sure. But if that's your metric for a good coticule... there are going to be a lot fewer "good" coticules and you probably aren't getting the best shaves coti's have to offer.


Sounds like you buy a lot of modern coticule.

I've owned maybe 6-10. My first I told em I wanted a long narrow razor hone. I got what I think was a La Dressante. Worked great, but it was basically a cube. Massively thick nat combo... prolly sell for 3x what I paid to the right person. But it was like 5x4"... the opposite of the dimensions I wanted. Also had one I think was a LNV that was a struggle to get a good finish on. Slow and big garnets... just not a great hone. The rest were pretty ok across the board. Some Vertes, a Grise, a couple unknowns. Nothing that wowed me.

Ive bought multiple hundreds of vintage coticules at this point. Should give you some perspective on how I feel an average vintage compares.

And yes they definitely vary. But the vintages mostly vary from... edge is solid/typical but the stone itself is laughably easy to use to edge is pushing into Jnat/Ark/Thuri Territory... but the stone is a little slower/harder/trickier. The spread isn't really a bad thing. From the hundreds of vintage coti's I've owned... hard to use and meh/bad edge is basically an anomaly. (They do exist though... I remember a 10x2.5" that looked like a 50's or 60's stone... Bold Made in Belgium stamp, etc... You could BEVEL on the thing... garnets measured 25microns+... surface felt like sandpaper).

This is all considering the hone as a finisher. I can't recall the last time I did a Dilucot.


Honestly the only coti's I'd say I tend to avoid are the thin yellow layered glued combos, especially if there's a sort of flaking/fish scale digout thing going on and no manganese. Those have a higher tendency to be the lower side of average in my experience.

At the right price, I buy almost any other vintage, and generally the easiest way to get the stones I like is look for older stones.

Older stones have been around longer.

1. they're harder and usually finer.
2. they survived a LONG time, possibly changing hands dozens of times and not wearing out... so they likely didn't get used for big tools, probably because they are finer than was desirable... IE they're likely stones that were picked specifically for razors or similar fine/small tool polishing.


This is the simplest strategy for trying to snag some extra-fine, top notch coticules.

If you want the fast, easy to use stuff... that's where you have to get really spendy/lucky. The good ol, look for LV's/Manganese/Stones that look like the famous (Salm, Old rock, Deep Rock, etc) labels are your best bet to guarantee you get that sort of rock. All good stones, and probably better suited for dilucot than the stuff I aim for... but if you're buying a $500+ Salm rock to dilucot you're gonna make my brain hurt.
 
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