David Weaver
09-11-2013, 9:35 PM
This is more of an FYI public service announcement for something that most of you guys will never see in person, but some may be tempted because of the cheap price.
There is a brand of waterstones coming out of china called "uusharp", and they look like ceramic type stones, and sometimes are advertised as such. They can be $20, or sometimes $30 for a combination 1000/6000 type stone. Not that I need any stones, but one of the listings I saw mentioned that they are very hard, so I bit just out of curiosity.
Well, in reality, they're not hard at all, and they require a soak to work - a full soak until total saturation. spray water on the surface of one without a soak and it disappears right away. Their softness is somewhere in the realm of kings (actually, they're even a fair bit softer) when they're soaked and they're messy.
I ordered two off of alibaba express (it's cheap), one 3k single grit stone and one 2k/5k combination stone. The single grit stone is green tinted and will leave you removing large amounts of green swarf off of everything as it sheds itself fast, and the 2k/5k is similarly soft (and also arrived broken).
I bit on the comment of them being extremely hard (and out of curiosity about whether or not they could make a decent stone in china), but they pretty much fail in all aspects.
There is a brand of waterstones coming out of china called "uusharp", and they look like ceramic type stones, and sometimes are advertised as such. They can be $20, or sometimes $30 for a combination 1000/6000 type stone. Not that I need any stones, but one of the listings I saw mentioned that they are very hard, so I bit just out of curiosity.
Well, in reality, they're not hard at all, and they require a soak to work - a full soak until total saturation. spray water on the surface of one without a soak and it disappears right away. Their softness is somewhere in the realm of kings (actually, they're even a fair bit softer) when they're soaked and they're messy.
I ordered two off of alibaba express (it's cheap), one 3k single grit stone and one 2k/5k combination stone. The single grit stone is green tinted and will leave you removing large amounts of green swarf off of everything as it sheds itself fast, and the 2k/5k is similarly soft (and also arrived broken).
I bit on the comment of them being extremely hard (and out of curiosity about whether or not they could make a decent stone in china), but they pretty much fail in all aspects.