Just saying hello…

Hello Faithful reader…

Things have been a little quiet here on the blog of late, I don’t think that’s news.

At the moment, it’s quite difficult to come up with anything meaningful to write about. I’m quite busy most of the time, have a bunch of things to try and keep track of and digging out a few hours to write something useful (or even useless) is difficult at best.

I’ll try to do what I can, and specifically, give some finish to the waterstone comparisons. I do need to write up the final analysis of each stone, which means digging through my notes, trying each one out again to make sure of my thoughts and trying to give an accurate, unbiased evaluation of each stone ‘in use’.

The delay in writing this up has been a blessing and a curse.

Blessing, because since the original articles were written it’s become clear that those of you out there reading do not use these stones only for tools, but knives as well and for some of you, razors. Because I’ve put off this evaluation, I can now include a few notes about how these stones perform with knives and razors in their expected roles.

Curse, because trying to start the motor again is difficult. With how things play out with the store (and other things), when it’s quiet it’s very easy to become down and depressed and more difficult that it otherwise might be. At these points, I must admit, I become fragile and more susceptible to ‘noise’.

And while I’m here, there has been some criticism of the testing procedures. Granted, not everyone uses these stones in the same way I have in testing, but in all honesty the way in which the stones have been tested matters less than how they compare to each other when used in the same manner. If you take two different stones and use them, they will exhibit similar differences to what the results show regardless of whether you’re working over a small or large chisel with or without a microbevel, a knife, razor, big thick Japanese plane blade or thin iron plane blade. The differences between the steels will also manifest itself on different stones regardless of what the blade actually is.

In short, the stones don’t care. They’re inert, glorified bricks/tiles and will do what they do here similarly to how they will do what they do for you.

The only thing not touched on is how the stones feel and that is something to be explored in the next installment. This is purely subjective, and you’ll be getting the information as I see it.

And at the moment, none of these stones under test are anything like perfect. All they can manage is different levels of good/bad/mediocre performance and there is no clear winner of any kind. Where one is good, another is better in another area but there is give and take across the board.

I hope that makes sense, and expect to see some new writings soon.

Thanks for reading, as always,

Stu.