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Yeah I've had a number of Charnleys which have been pretty decent thickness, a couple of which have combined that with being 2"+ wide, which seems less common. I suspect you're almost certainly correct about the Idwal stone. There's at least one quarry near Llyn Melynllyn where the same type of...

Absolutely. I spent quite a decent chunk of time trying to find a contemporary c.19th or early c.20th source that explicitly mentioned production of whetstones in Crete, or linked them to the Turkey/Turkish Oilstone. But the 'interior of Asia minor' idea seems to have been repeated as gospel...

We can now recognise the majority of whetstones he describes, with a couple of notable exceptions - the Cutler's Green and Devonshire Oilstone are still subject to some debate and speculation. Though Mr. Knight also perhaps can't be considered the most reliable of narrators. He appears to mix...

Copied below is another well known English language description of various types of sharpening stone. This is a letter of 1836 from a Mr. Richard Knight, to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture, and Commerce. --- Sir...

Haha! Yes indeed. Yep I think Cretans probably are more pororus than Washitas in terms of how much they take on and how quickly. But for both stones it doesn't actually go very deep no matter how long you leave them. They reach a kinda pressure equilibrium. You can see it if ever you get...

Oh I've never tried putting one in an oven after soaking. Though I have heard you can melt wax into them in an oven, which makes them extremely fine and slow, and is apparently irreversible. Certainly though every old Turkish I've had degreased far easier / faster than Washitas generally do...

It's certainly true as you say that old Turkish stones would normally have initially been soaked in olive oil. There are a couple of old sources that describe them being transported to Smyrna in barrels of it, and I found an old Levant Company duty document from 1836 which shows they were being...

Ah interesting that you got some stones when they were still selling the three different colours. In my pic above the one on the left I think is probably what would be called the 'black' kind, with the other three the normal 'grey' (I think). The 'white' version you have is noticeably softer and...

Cheers for this recommendation too, I'll have to hunt down a copy. As you can possibly tell - I have a slightly geeky interest in this kind of thing!

To be completely honest I wouldn't fret too much about finding a darker, finer example. The faster, slightly coarser versions are better (imo) because as you say - they can start to almost have the kind of range as Washitas. Whereas fine ones are comparatively slow, and can't do the heavy...

I didn’t know this until recently, but obsidian scalpels are actually still used for surgery today apparently. Which is quite cool! https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/02/health/surgery-scalpels-obsidian/index.html

[Copied from a post I made on KKF earlier this year] For a while I, and a few others I've spoken to, have found it curious that in Australia old examples of Turkish Oilstones are relatively common - I come across them far more often than I do Washitas, a stone produced in much greater...

Continuing in your bubble of talking about Turkish stones D... I've had quite a few old Turkish and quite a few modern Cretans, and I am completely 100% convinced they are one and the same. There is more variability in the old ones than in the ones available today, but it's all the same stone...

Ah interesting, I hadn't seen that! So the picture I posted above came from a finding just a bit after that, in 2017. Which was why the caption says it had 'rewritten the history of Australia' - pushing the date of the earliest migration back by about 20,000 years...

Yeah it’s an interesting little bit of Norton history. I think at least in part it was also to allow them to sell into commonwealth (and later EU) countries without certain tariffs and taxes that goods from the US would’ve attracted. I believe Australian Abrasives were a Norton owned. You can...

Reading through some old threads I noticed some... err... 'spirited debate' on occasion, some of which revolved around the historical use of sharpening stones. So here, in case it's of interest to anyone, are some bits of history... --- The world's oldest known whetting stone is at least...

It's certainly very much the case for honyaki knives and katana that particular makers will have a distinctive hamon style. There's one very famous one which is the 'Moon Over Mt. Fuji', where the Hamon looks like the outline of the mountain and a crescent moon is usually etched on the blade...

I really like that handle, great job. I used to work in the wine/restaurant biz for quite a while and kitchens overwhelmingly use rubber/ plastic handled knives. Downside being that they usually look like c***. Yours is great though :).

I was certainly quite happy when I opened the top of the translucent's box yep :). I'm sure you know but Norton had a subsidary company and production factory in the UK for about 50 years from the early '30s. So actually there are a surprising number of post-Pike era stones to be found here, you...

Yes, this is generally my experience with most of them, more suited to razors perhaps than proper abrasive cutting. I was rather surprised that the Fiddich River (for want of a better name) actually turned out to be quite good, and not a case of style over substance. Strictly speaking it's...