Can't wait to see his results!!
black vs translucent ark from dan's whetstones
- Thread starter kohalajohn
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Best post of the thread. You've just provided a progression that works for you. Others should take note.
I’ve done that many times to check the SG of my arks. I’m not sure how accurate it is with vintage stones because of the potential oil thats inside, but with newly mined stones it should work great.
So...is there any significant advantage to putting a translucent extra-fine Arkansas stone in the progression, following a black surgical Arkansas?
- Thread starter
- #25
David, what did you find as a result of your displacement tests?
- Thread starter
- #26
I don't own a progression of arks, so I can't speak from experience.
And unlike David and Jarrod, I've never tested specific gravities. I'd sure like to see a thread on that.
But in the conversations I have had with knowledgeable folk here, I would guess that there is probably not a significant advantage to what you suggest.
It seems that we don't progress through arks the way we do through synths. That arks don't have regular, predictable, step based gradients like synths. Yeah, a light coloured "soft" one can set a bevel, and yeah, a black one or a translucent one can finish.
But progression to finer results seems to be achieved by lightening the pressure instead.
Others may have different opinions.
Also it may be that terms like "extra fine" and "surgical" are not helpful. The colour is a guide to how dense that stone is, but the particles are no more "fine" or "coarse" than in other arks. The particles are just buried more deeply in the matrix, depending on what underground pressure that rock was subjected to.
It's all just silica made from the ground up skeletons of plankton. Then compressed to various densities at varying depths deep in the ground. They're all pretty hard.
I think @Dzaw explained things pretty well in post #19. Arks behave differently than many other stones.
Black is typically denser than translucent stones, but how well the stone is burnished changes how it performs. So, putting grit labels on them can be misleading.
You can take a translucent or surgical stone lapped with a diamond plate and use it like as a coarser stone. Or, you can burnish it and use it as a finisher. I know of one guy that actually keeps one side burnished and the other side rough. He can hone a razor from start to finish on the same stone!
Man, it’s been a while. From what I remember the blacks, translucents, and butterscotch stones were close to the same. It’s somewhere in the “finally bought an ark” thread. I’ll see if I can dig it up tonight.
But that was all done with vintage arks. The only experience I have with modern stones are with Dans black stones.
- Thread starter
- #30
Yeah, David, that's the impression I also got from Jarrod. Black, translucent, butterscotch, they vary in appearance, but not much difference in actual honing. And all very close to the same density.
Another piece of weirdness. That "soft" light coloured ark that is glued on to my black finishing ark, the one that is the bevel setter. It took Jarrod about the same amount of time to lap it convex, as the black side.
Another piece of weirdness. That "soft" light coloured ark that is glued on to my black finishing ark, the one that is the bevel setter. It took Jarrod about the same amount of time to lap it convex, as the black side.
I’ve noticed the same thing with some soft arks and Washita. It’s like they shed a thin layer of particles from the stone and then just skate on top of them, keeping the stone from hitting the abrasives that you’re lapping with.
- Thread starter
- #32
I wonder if that's why we don't create slurry on arks. Where we do create slurry on jnats and coticules. Arks are so dense and slippery that water just slides right off.
Maybe slurry does not work on dense, slippery stones. We could take an atoma 1200 and create it, but the slurry would just slide around like roller skates under your foot. Nothing grabs on and bites. And like you say, slurry would actually prevent polishing. You're just moving steel back and forth over a layer of rolling ball bearings.
You have to avoid slurry and just do the slow process of sliding against a hard slippery surface.
Still works though. If you're patient even a hard slippery surface will polish steel, apparently.
Maybe slurry does not work on dense, slippery stones. We could take an atoma 1200 and create it, but the slurry would just slide around like roller skates under your foot. Nothing grabs on and bites. And like you say, slurry would actually prevent polishing. You're just moving steel back and forth over a layer of rolling ball bearings.
You have to avoid slurry and just do the slow process of sliding against a hard slippery surface.
Still works though. If you're patient even a hard slippery surface will polish steel, apparently.
kelbro
Alfred Spatchcock
I've owned several of each. I have found that the hone-ability varies between blacks and translucent enough to not be able to definitively label one as a better finisher than the other. None are bad but like any natural, you need to cycle through several of them to find the real winners.
I’ve found the feedback different between black and translucent, but I only have a small translucent I’ve had forever so my opinion is probably skewed by size differences. Overall though, I think the feedback from my trans is sort of like a sticky window and the feedback from Dans surgical black is like a nearly dead piece of sandpaper losing its last tiny scraps of grit. I couldn’t tell you which is finer because they’re close, but I like the feedback on Dans surgical black more.
I’m tempted to try either a Dans or Norton full size translucent though.
I’m tempted to try either a Dans or Norton full size translucent though.
Slurry on arks isn't so much abrasive particles from the ark (quartz in this case), as either abrasive from your slurry-maker (whether it be another stone or some kind of paper or a cheap diamond plate), or shaved off chunks of a large slab of crystalline quartz.
That's why slurry doesn't work. Arks don't make slurry. They don't have microscopic, defined abrasive particles the way a silica-based stone does. Hard Arkansas is a slab of a mostly uniform quartz structure. "slurrying" it is just sanding chunks off the structure, the way sanding a piece of plexiglass doesn't give you microscopic beads of plexiglass... sanding an arkansas doesn't give you any "grit" you'd want to hone on unless you just want to screw up an edge.
The only real use of slurry on Arks I've seen is people simply using the ark as a glass-like substrate for honing on some other sources slurry. I've not tried it myself, but lots of folks have... I don't know many that repeated it after testing.
That's why slurry doesn't work. Arks don't make slurry. They don't have microscopic, defined abrasive particles the way a silica-based stone does. Hard Arkansas is a slab of a mostly uniform quartz structure. "slurrying" it is just sanding chunks off the structure, the way sanding a piece of plexiglass doesn't give you microscopic beads of plexiglass... sanding an arkansas doesn't give you any "grit" you'd want to hone on unless you just want to screw up an edge.
The only real use of slurry on Arks I've seen is people simply using the ark as a glass-like substrate for honing on some other sources slurry. I've not tried it myself, but lots of folks have... I don't know many that repeated it after testing.
I love my Trans Ark, but I think my Blacki takes the edges to another level.
I know one woodworker who has used an atoma to slurry up the old manufactured “oil stones” like carborundum or India. I can see how someone might see or hear about odd balls like that and think you can slurry anything, but you really shouldn’t slurry some things.
Dan's are very popular among razor guys and not disliked among wood workers. But the only consensus I've ever seen is that Norton has the best mines. There's a review out there that claims that Hall's has significantly better surgical blacks than Dan's, on par with their translucents whereas Dan's Translucents are far superior to their Surgical Blacks. But truth be told, I sort of suspect that every single person claiming one is better than another has too small a sample size to be speaking authoritatively, and most of the time is probably basing their claims on comparing as few as two stones.
That’s the truth.
Not disliked is an understatement though, two ringing endorsements came in from Chris Schwarz and the current hand tool dovetail speed champ, and I think they’re rising in popularity again. They’ve always been popular with carvers and anyone I know who actually went through some manner of apprenticeship under a European style carpenter/cabinetmaker. For a lot of people they’ve never really touched waterstones, they were almost looked at as a passing fad.
