I found one that’s similar to yours with manganese running through the bbw. The yellow on this one is pure fire. One of my favorites.
BBW variety
- Thread starter rideon66
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I think the one I have that might be a Lorraine(my wine colored bbw) is glued on. At first I thought it was a natural combo but it looks like it has some very old, yellowing and cracking glue in some spots.
To be fair I was rushed. I only spent a minute or two on the stone. I’ll try it more later
That is unique, and beautiful! Never saw one like that before!!
All my BBW are quite similar in color, but I like the holographic pattern of some..
Thanks Bill. It’s a looker for sure
I had one of the same kind of thing I think. Very sharply defined, wavy/jagged border to the coticule. Dark BBW with some very pretty blue / green bits in it (albeit not as much as yours).
One man's meat is another man's poison though... the BBW was lovely as ever and I could tell the coti was going to be quite good for razors, but it was too hard and fine for good knife sharpening, so I sold it.
It's the stone next to the Goldfisch Wetzstein in my post above, though this is the only pic I can find of the weird BBW colouring. The blue n green bits were a bit more pronounced in person:
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- #30
Ok that is what I was thinking. I know I read this whole thing before years ago maybe that is why I thought this I can't remember. It also makes sense why you never see a labeled one with coticule on the back. I can say I have never tried a true La Lorraine/Rouge du Salm. I have tried some of those wine colored ones attached to the layers mentioned which where ok, but I never really gave them a go on knives and the coti sides where just so much better on razors.
I also have one of the La Verte from the Quarry so have a typical BBW for comparison.
Ah cheers, I too had forgotten this section, and now that I think about it - it perhaps doesn't contradict what I said above about the term 'Lorraine'. If it's used in a purely geological sense in Belgium; if there were veins of some slightly different rock (perhaps originating there), then they presumably would use the term to differentiate it from the more normal Ardennes stone.
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My impression of my piece of LaL FWIW is that it's not so very different from or superior to BBW that it's worth worrying about too much, at least for what I use it for. It is a bit faster and it is a bit finer; maybe like a coti/bbw mashup, but leaning more to BBW side. The difference may be more apparent in terms of razor honing - I'm going to give mine a proper spin today and see how it does, my hunch is that it will probably finish a razor quite nicely.
Based on the resources available (made known to me from the writings of @hatzicho and Henk Bos) it is my understanding that La Lorraine is a distinct geological type. It bears similarities to BBW and occurs between BBW layers, just as coticule occurs between BBW layers. I get the impression that it would be an excellent knife stone, but not so awesome as a razor finisher. Perhaps it would be well-suited for razor bevel-setting through mid-range?
I can't read French, so my understanding of the attached PDF is limited thus far.
I can't read French, so my understanding of the attached PDF is limited thus far.
Here's some of the BBW in my rock pile:
I honed a henkles on an old coticule, then went to my coticule with the wine backing. I finished on the wine colored side, I'll shave with it tomorrow and I'll update on how it was. From a dry scrape on my neck it seemed keener than the "yellow" side(it's pretty darn white).
Thank you for this. I can read French a bit (though I'm sure not as well as many others here), so will have a look later and report back if anything particularly interesting comes up.
Nice array and variety of stones you have there. Any favourites in terms of the BBW sides...?
The shave off the wine colored bbw was fantastic.
Yeah, that PDF started out as a regular scanned document I located on the internet. I created the prior attached version by running the OCR function within my PDF reader and making a new searchable version. I then tried to get translate.google.com to translate the whole document into English, but it wouldn't do that for me.
With the respect to the BBWs in my photo, I've only put knives on three of them so far, no razors. If they were numbered left to right then #5 would be the best, with #3 not far behind. I took some micrographs of the stones a couple of months ago. The garnet sizing across the three stones is awfully close, but the distribution of garnets across #5 seems to be superior. I expected #4 to be the best, only because it is part of a natural combo and the coticule is awfully good. #5 is a glued combo.
The magnification for each photo is about 157x.
#3
#4
#5
My best is a glued combo and it's fast better than any of my natural convoys save my Les lat.
I found rather a nice stone yesterday in a second hand tool shop. And it turned out to be another one with a sharply-defined, wavy/irregular transition, and some blue-green bits in the BBW. The coti feels to me like it will be a better for razors than knives.
Do we know what vein this might be @rideon66 @David? Or are these features that can happen in various types...?
Do we know what vein this might be @rideon66 @David? Or are these features that can happen in various types...?
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- #40
Oli it could just be a vintage, but Charateristic wise from pic could be a LPB.
Oh and in looking back at the G&H part4 I see the obvious confusion now. Although they speak of RDS and Lorraine as being a layer that would not be attach to a coticule in every pic of a coticule the call the BBW RDS Lorraine.
