Paging Dr. Weaver ...

[Joe Bailey]

David,

As of this writing, with 6 hrs to go, this Pike Washita stone, item# 351009698995 had been bid up to $162.50.

That reminded me that someone had given me one, some time ago.
I have a few questions if you're willing to entertain them.

1) I don't need to use this stone, but I'd like to. If I was to use kerosene, (on the non-label side) do I run the risk off dissolving the label?
(I'm assuming one wouldn't use this type stone without lube.)

2) would using kerosene possibly make a gummy mess of things, given that I don't know what, if anything was ever used on it.

Thanks in advance for any insights you can offer.

Pics of my stone below:
283906283907

[James Taglienti]

I can't believe these vintage labeled stone prices. A couple years ago you couldn't give a #1 washita away!!

These prices have got to crash. There's no way this can be maintained.

[David Weaver]

Very nice looking stone. Kerosene is no problem. If the surface of the stone stays clean, and you can see it, you're good to go.

The label probably will come off in time if it gets wet. However, there is no great reason that it should. Of all of the old vintage stones that I get out of the boxes (where they are tightly affixed) almost all of them have a bright white clean back side that has never seen anything dirty (including swarfy oil that would yellow over time). It doesn't get to the back of the stone - I guess the "pores don't connect".

However, if you use the stone out on an open surface, it is bound to pick up oil, water, or anything else wet that may be on the surface of your sharpening area, and it will come off. My lilywhite label is sitting loose in the box under my stone because I was too lazy to make a box early on and it came off in two pieces one day. that was a downer. You can put it back on, but I personally would rather have a box or always keep it on a dry surface.

Two other things that work well on a washita:
* wd 40 - loose wd40 or in one of those trigger bottles, not the mist blasting aerosols
* light mineral oil

You knew these things already, I'm sure. I've never used kerosene, but if you use it sparingly on the top of your stone and don't let it splash down the sides and all over the stone (or if you do, have the stone snugly fitted in a box), the label will probably be fine. In the event that it would seem that something is drying into the stone on the surface, use mineral oil for a little while or lap it off (I'd prefer not to lap the stones because they're so lovely to use when they're settled in).

I saw that no 1 at 162.50. I have no idea who would drive up a no 1 like that, but the stones seem to be in fashion.

Your stone is very clean, I wouldn't worry about a gummy anything on it. Just make sure you keep enough lubrication on the surface from time to time to lift the metal particles away it it'll be good.

You can lap it clean with a diamond hone any time.

These are the only stones that I can think of where you can literally use vintage tools and do everything post grinder, and get a hair shaving edge off the stone, and really a very good hair shaving edge off of a clean leather strop. I just made a pair of moulding planes in the last couple of weeks and did all of the paring and all of the chisel work straight off of a washita only and I have to be honest, I didn't see much degradation over the scorched earth routine I used to use (that ended with a sub micron stone). The edge has a more regulated feel in a paring cut, too - very controllable in cuts that can be over cut - you'll know what I mean if you go sufficiently far down this washita rabbit hole.

[Jim Koepke]

As of this writing, with 6 hrs to go, this Pike Washita stone had been bid up to $162.50.

You missed this one:

Item number:301106308188

2" X 7" for $310 with 4 hours left.

Some folks have too much money.

Maybe it is time to sell my little 1X3 stone. I am afraid to use it.

jtk

[David Weaver]

I can't believe these vintage labeled stone prices. A couple years ago you couldn't give a #1 washita away!!

These prices have got to crash. There's no way this can be maintained.

If some "pro honers" tell shavers that these make good pre-finishers, there will be a lot of staying power to the prices. I don't know who's responsible for it. It's caused me to have to go underground and buy the oilstones that are labeled only as "vintage sharpening stone" where you can only just see a little bit of the stone surface and make an educated decision about whether it might be a pike mine type of stone.

There was some set of posts a while ago that you couldn't finish a razor on a washita stone. There are a lot of different washitas, and some of the pike stones have very tight surfaces and say "fine" on the ends. Some of the other vintage stones have extremely tight surfaces and almost look like borderline translucents with pores.

261390007167

For example, that one would work a razor no problem if it wasn't all dinged up. It's maybe a bit fine as a single stone for tools.

One of the fine stones that I've gotten was clearly used for razors - whoever used it had allowed it to partially load.

Anyway, there is plenty of pike mine material for norton to make stones - it's one of the few desirable types of natural stones that haven't been clapped out. They (norton) don't care much about woodworkers as far as I can tell, we are a tiny slice compared to industrial abrasives and the high notoriety things like putting some sort of surface on a luge sled runner. They care little enough that when I sent their customer service email a question regarding labeling of their trans stones (that they changed), they didn't feel the need to responnd.

[David Weaver]

You missed this one:

Item number:301106308188

2" X 7" for $310 with 4 hours left.

Some folks have too much money.

Maybe it is time to sell my little 1X3 stone. I am afraid to use it.

jtk

That's ridiculous. Either the razor or the knife people must be on washita dope.

[Jeff Heath]

Please forgive my ignorance.....I've never spent 10 seconds trying to understand japanese sharpening stones. Can someone please tell me what the big deal is, and what's so special about one vs. using any other sharpening medium that gets the tool sharp.

I'm not being a wise-acre; I really would like to hear (read) it. I have a couple of pretty expensive sharpening stones (at least to me) that I bought, ohhhhhhhhhhh, 15 years ago or so, that are from japan. One is blue and approx. 4000 grit, and the other is yellow for final honing and polishing with a (?SP) ngura(?) stone to get the paste going. I quit using them because they dished so easily and quickly.

Thanks.

[David Weaver]

The blue one if it's dark blue and very muddy is probably a tanba aoto. They are common, but not a great stone for most things. They are an OK knife semi finisher. the better aoto type stones are naguras, and good versions cost more like $400. A decent tanba aoto is about a quarter of that in big size.

The lighter stone that you have if it's a natural stone is probably some sort of soft finisher - yellow stones are referred to as kiita (which as far as I know is just a color reference) and in finishers, kiita stones are usually on the soft side and expensive for what you get because the color is rare.

There is an entire range of japanese waterstones, and you generally will not get any satisfaction out of them unless you're using japanese carbon steel tools. They will cut harder carbon steel tools that oilstones tend to bog down and burnish, but they have a narrow range of application, and I don't find them to do anything particularly great with softer lower carbon western steels.

[Jack Curtis]

Please forgive my ignorance.....I've never spent 10 seconds trying to understand japanese sharpening stones. Can someone please tell me what the big deal is, and what's so special about one vs. using any other sharpening medium that gets the tool sharp.

I'm not being a wise-acre; I really would like to hear (read) it. I have a couple of pretty expensive sharpening stones (at least to me) that I bought, ohhhhhhhhhhh, 15 years ago or so, that are from japan. One is blue and approx. 4000 grit, and the other is yellow for final honing and polishing with a (?SP) ngura(?) stone to get the paste going. I quit using them because they dished so easily and quickly.

Thanks.

Do you remember how much you paid for them? Perhaps we could guess whether they're natural or man made and what you should expect from them.

[Joe Bailey]

Thanks, David

That was very helpful (and articulately stated)

[Noah Wagener]

there is a guy selling them with no bidding for about 30 with 25 dollar shipping cost because it is from Wales.

itm 181340396800. he has about 3 that are half length for that price and then some more at over one hundered with their labels and full size.


at ontarioantiquetools.com they have 2 for about eighty shipped.

[Charlie MacGregor]

You just can't stump the eminent cheeseburger jockey from Nova Scotia.

[David Weaver]

That extra fine washita is super. I'd probably buy it for that price if it was 8x2, but at 6x2, I'm out.

Even at 8x2, that would be what I'd consider collector's price.

The trouble with ebay getting these high prices is that all of the dealers are going to start seeing the ebay prices and ....well, I guess that'll make it so I have all of the washitas I'm going to have then, unless I spy the junkers I've been getting.

All of those stones from the ontario dealer are pike type washitas (except the gray one in the box, no clue what that is), though I don't know if they would've ever gotten the label - esp. the one with the big long crack. But they are the type, and not just soft arkansas stone labeled washita.

[James Taglienti]

That's ridiculous. Either the razor or the knife people must be on washita dope.

I only know one group of guys who are willing to quadruple their budget for something with a label on it... And I know at least 2 guilty parties in this thread :)

There must be some kind of primal satisfaction in rubbing your tools on just the right magic rock.

[David Weaver]

I'd consider the labeling a nice thing to have if:
1) you're going to buy the stone and intend to sell it in similar condition later. They are definitley rarer with good labels, especially if the label confirms something desirable
2) The unlabeled washitas that I have are all over the board. Most are finer and a bit more dense than the pike labeled stones I've gotten. A lilywhite washita label confirms that the stone will be good for woodworking tools.

But, you're right, there is not enough difference to make sense of the label value from a user standpoint unless one is extremely wealthy and has very little time to find a decent stone

I am guilty of buying some labeled stones, I do like the pike lilywhite the best of all of my washitas for woodworking, but a couple of the other less fine stones may settle in to be the same thing if they were used as much as I've used it. I wouldn't give more than a hundred bucks for one, though. And I wouldn't, and haven't, given more than $40 for an unlabeled stone. Even I have my limits.

I'd never buy a $700 1.5x7 escher, either. there must be lots of guys who do.

Another legitimate concern would be if someone described a washita as an ideal knife for "bushcraft", you know the stuff that's all over youtube where suburbanites run into a moderately wooded area and describe why they can get by with nothing less than a $400 powder metal knife to whack chunks out saplings.

[Mel Fulks]

I saw a reference the other day about lily white stones being labeled on end as fine or coarse, but I never see any other mention.

[David Weaver]

I may have been the one who said that. they have to still have the end label to show it, though.

Ebay completed item - look at the picture.

301076548623

I don't know how many of them were labeled on the end like this. Any evidence that mine had a label on the end is long gone now, and the newer stones appear to have a label on the side only (like many of norton's later offerings). I have an india/washita combination that has a label on the side but nothing on the end.

I usually figure any stone that's got a good clean label on the end is going to go way out of my range. I would've paid what that one sold for, though, just to have one (as in i'd pay that once, but not twice or more).

The only trouble with having really nice things like that is you never like to use them that much (or maybe it's just me).

[Mel Fulks]

Thanks. I think I saw it in some 19th century report about types and industry of stones that shows up googling ,but I never see it mentioned in regard to ebay stuff.

[David Weaver]

When pike was marketing their stones separately, I wonder if they were selling the range of stones as a coarse and fine solution, or if they were targeting them to different groups (like the coticules, which have a reputation for being a fine stone, but there are plenty of more coarse coticules unsuitable for razors - they just don't have a big label on them that says "special for the barber trades".

The pike hards look like the vintage norton hards, but they are all out of my price range, and it may have been that pike and norton were together by then. The answer of that is probably easy to find, but I am more of a fanatic of the stones themselves and less so about the history of the companies.

My pikes would not qualify as fine stones (I have only ever seen fine and soft end labels), but when used without conditioning the surface, they become very fine cutting (especially with light pressure) without losing the ability to raise a wire edge.

[Mel Fulks]

The article says blocks of stone were carefully checked and labeled on site and the finished stone would get description label on the end. Is there a range in grit rating of the ones you've seen?

[David Weaver]

Just coarse/soft and fine/hard. There may be more, but end labeled stones don't come up in droves, so it may be that we've only seen two because others haven't sold and become visible online.

Japanese miners pretty much do the same thing, as far as I know - grade the stones at the mine and determine where they're going.

A couple of months ago, I thought it was very high when a nice unused stone went for $260, it had very clean fresh labels, cleaner than the one showing above.

How that labeled stone sells for $140 and a newer behr manning or newer era lilywhite goes for $310 or whatever that 7 inch stone settled on is really just ebay magic.