Mystery Japanese natural stone speed and finish test.

Hello there.

Some time ago I bought a Japanese natural stone from 330_mate on Ebay. I paid only 20£ so it was a bargain. Unfortunately there was one condition. I couldn't choose stone so I bought a pig in a poke. Some time later I had my stone. My first impression was bad. I tried to sharpen a knife on it but it was a dull knife so I really don't know what I was expecting. I asked some people from Kitchen Knife Forums to help me identify this stone but it is really hard to do that when you only look at the stone. I asked seller to tell me something about it. He told me that strata is central Tomae and it is Mid age mine Nakayama Akapin Nashiji red!

Hardness is class 4. Also he added that this is best stone for hard knives and that I am lucky.

It is very confussing because Tomae Strata and Akapin are two different stratas and this is very soft stone from what I have noticed.

Anyway I've put it away and forgot about it.

I remind myself about that stone last week when I was working on Masamoto yanagiba. I used it only for few minutes and I made fingerstone out of it. The results were very good so I decided to try it out.

I polished my Suisin Densyo white#1 yanagiba to white Binsui level. I didn't wanted to make it perfect but only to try it out. There is still a lot of JNS1000 scratches.

Yesterday I couldn't resist and I have used fingerstone on half of the blade. Results were great. This J-nat is leaving very nice contrast between jigane and hagane.

Here you can see scratches from JNS1000 and Binsui.

I have recorded short movie where you can see speed of that stone.

And finish after it:

So now it is a time to use fingerstone. As you can see on this video it started to create mud after few strokes. It became darker and darker very quickly.

Then I took some very small chips of mystery stone and Uchigomori and ground them in mortar.

Then i mixed it with water and using felt polished the blade.

I think that results are great. I bought that stone for 20£ on ebay and I didn't know what I am going to get. This stone is polishing very fast and it removes scratches very quickly. I can't say much about edge it leaves because I didn't have occassion to use sharpened knife but I will definitely try it out. The finish I have left on that knife is not perfect but as I said before I didn't try to make it nice. I think that next time I will try to achieve great results.

Masamoto KK 270mm yanagiba part 4

Hello. So at least I have finished this project. Today I will show you only the results of my work. I took loads of pictures while doing it but I had to change many things and also I started to being nervous about it. First of all I had some problems with the handle. First handle has fallen apart when I finished shaping it. Then when it was nice and shiny it fallen apart again between ferrule and new silver. When I glued tang in to the handle I have noticed smal gap between wood and spacer. I had to use super glue and then polish it. It was quite tricky and because of that handle changed it shape a little bit. Also when I glued it in I had to remove some glue from the top of the ferrule and then it was very hard to polish it again.

Mirror finish. Ahh that bloody mirror finish. I was doing it three times. Last result was always scratched. Why? I think that it was scratched because polishing mop was full of residue so I bought new one. I think that I did a mistake and I prepared mop. You have to turn it on on the machine anf put something in to it.    Fibers from mop are everywhere. Then you have to burn it a little bit and repeat whole process again. This is what I have seen on youtube. I must say that I haf better results without preparing it at first time.

Kasumi. This was my first real attempt to kasumi. I bought Uchigomori but I had some problems with them. Even after preparation they were scratching my surface. Obviously it's because of my technique. I will experiment with them in the future. The problem is that if I have left binsui finish and then Polish with uchigomori I could get very good results but after Binsui I used red aoto and Oohira to sharpen. Oohira is very hard and it scratched blade road. After that it was very hard to remove scratches with fingerstones. 

Also I think that if one don't have Uchigomori he can use white Binsui to polish and then create loads of mud out of it and using felt polish with mud. It will give one very good results.

I have finished because I easily spent 40 - 50 hours on that knife and every attempt to make something better result in making things worse. I think that it's my best work but every time when I am starting new projects I am less satisfied with results. Maybe it's because I want to be better and better. See you soon.

Before:

After:

Masamoto KK 270mm yanagiba project part 3 - New handle and mirror polishing

Hello there:D

At least I have finished new handle for Masamoto yanagiba. I have to say that it is the best handle I have ever done. It's made of Stabilised brown maple burl, water buffalo horn and new silver. I had some problems with grinding it because new silver was getting hot very quickly so I had bucket full of water with ice and I immersed handle in it every few seconds. When I was finished and started to polish it I had to unglue it and glue it again just for sure. Also I checked for straightness and symmetry every few seconds.

Before shaping:

After shaping:

 Finally polished:

Then I mirror polished flat face of the knife. I knew that it will be little bit concave so instead of doing it with sanding paper I have used stones.
I started with Atoma 140 to flatten it. You can see that I was removing steel from sides first. This shows me that it is concave.

 Then I followed diamond plate with Beston 500, JNS 1000, White binsui, Red Aoto, Shapton pro 8000 and after that I used my polishing mops and compounds. It took me few hours but it was definitely faster than with sand paper. I didn't remove all Atoma scratches because these were very deep and I had to do that with first hard mop and green paste. Maybe I will do that again.

 

My next step will be removing original grind scratches from blade road, sharpening and polishing and when I'll be finished I will make kasumi with Uchigomori fingerstones.

New gear

Today I recieved nice package from Maxim at Japanesenaturalstones.com
I bought Atoma 140 diamond plate which I will use for lapping stones and heavy repairs. Also I get very nice Uchigomori sword grade stone which I will use to make some finger stones. I really can't wait to use them for kasumi finish.

Atoma140:

Uchigomori sword grade