Description
Well, though it is still a task of pure misery however long you’re on the clock, this magical sheet of diamonds really helped cut down on the labor. It is essentially a $$$ sheet of magic super-sandpaper, and there’s no telling how many fastballs that dude’s got in him before he’s lost a step. I was able to beat up a dozen or so bench stones and a similar number of slurry stones, including some Arks, before the 12x18cm sheet seemed to notably slow (but still it cuts!)
Nonetheless, we have here a 2x6x0.9″ Dan’s Soft Arkansas Stone, and one of its 2×6″ surfaces has been shaped with this tool to become a 6.5’Ø primary axis ellipse, with a secondary axis of ~25’Ø. Polished to 400 grit sandpaper, and it won’t get much finer as you use it, but if it does, keep some ~225-400 grit sandpaper handy and rough it up ever so slightly…in fact, this thing is ideal, and PLEASE use that affiliate link to buy something in a single cookie session so I can earn a ~2% commission on your purchasing, it doesn’t have to be this sheet of sandpaper it can be anything you want and it doesn’t cost you anything…trust me, I need your money, whatever you can spare.
Soft Arkansas has (much) more statistically significant density variability than hard Arkansas, and in fact some miners would fervently argue you want the least dense piece, not the dense one. In any case, across a 2×6″ pitch, when shaping these stones to become ellipse surfaces, the density variances will be followed and you’ll get a ‘peak of the hill’ that isn’t in the dead center of the 2x6x1″ original form…thus, on this piece, one 2″ side’s corners are ~2mm less thick than the other side, and the ‘peak of the hill’ is ~53mm from one of the two 2″ ends, not ~75mm. It doesn’t matter; the curve you’re using with the razor’s exactly the same thing to the razor, and you will never remotely come close to consuming this stone in your lifetime if you’re using it primarily for razors.
With other rocks, I’ll often make an ‘anti’ stone to the inverse shape of the bench stone, for your geographical upkeep needs instead of buying the costly plate. But I can assure you, for reasons I do not understand but are detailed here by this crazy guy that I am certain does know more than I on the topic, when you shape a soft Ark to become ‘a sharpening ellipse’, the damned thing never seems to change shape. I should know; I have a 2.5×10″ soft Ark in my office which I should rightly sell, because it was based on my original shaping ‘invention’ of a 1×1′ granite tile with a broad, large-diameter ellipse concavity (that only concaves the bevel gently, a razor can take much more concaving than such a shape can impart, you want a shape such as this thing, or an even shorter primary diameter!)
I’d used that thing thousands of times, literally multiple thousands, between ~2017-2020, and I have checked it countless times, never once did I ever get to observe a flattening at the ‘dead center spot’ of the stone’s pitch, like you’d presume would happen at least in surface texture on a hard/trans Ark. It just doesn’t happen on the soft Ark; it keeps on wearing evenly, your razor seeks the high spots.
