Anyone know more about these Naniwa stones?

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I think I might have mentioned these stones briefly in my previous thread about looking for a mid-grit stone; they showed up on eBay, but actually stumbled across a couple of auctions that have pictures of the boxes, so I thought with that, someone might have more info in them. I'm just curious if anyone knows anything about them? Are they just Superstones with different packaging, something different and softer, or something from an odd line, akin to the "Snow White"?

I don't see anything looking like this on the Naniwa-Abrasive.com site, but there might be something on the naniwa-kenma.co.jp site, but I get lost there easily even trying machine translate.

The ebay auction numbers that show what I stumbled across are:

231029432923

and

231029951259

[Chris Griggs]

Nope, but Archie just pointed this one out to me the other day which is "of the same series as the snow white" http://www.chefknivestogo.com/naniwaie0300.html...whatever that means ( I would hope it means its very very similar)

You'll have to wait for it to come back in stock though. Its a good bit less expensive than the Cho 3k, but still somewhat pricey.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

That's another one I swear I saw on eBay as well, but don't seem to see now.

[David Weaver]

See if you can find a naniwa stone page that is in english. The have a whole glom of stones that aren't otherwise marketed to woodworkers, which may mean that they are soft and fast (but emphasis on the soft) for the knife fanatics.

[David Weaver]

Naniwa's page isn't much help, but a discussion on the knife forums forum suggests that it is also magnesia. The 3000 chosera is 4 microns. I can't imagine that the shrimp 4000 is smaller particles than that.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

See if you can find a naniwa stone page that is in english. The have a whole glom of stones that aren't otherwise marketed to woodworkers, which may mean that they are soft and fast (but emphasis on the soft) for the knife fanatics.

Yeah, the main Naniwa site, at naniwa-kenma.co.jp, if you click "english" on the top, redirects you to the English version of the Naniwa-Abrasive.com site, (which proudly mentions it's been update in June of 2011) which appears to have fewer stones than the Japanese site at Naniwa-kenma.co.jp .

I feel like I had run across one of these, with the same picture of the opened packaging and the "QA-0112" listed in the first auction number I list, for like $45 - if the shipping isn't ridiculous, that's almost just curious what it actually is money . . .