Description
This is a one-of-one item.
What we have here is the 2.5x10x0.5″ Dan’s Soft Arkansas Stone which I used for my living here in the shop from late 2016 up until I started further down the rabbit hole of convexing whetstones to concave razor bevels. I would say, quite conservatively, it has had 2000 razors over it professionally, but somewhere in the 3000-5000 sounds more accurate.
To shape this stone, I made a concave 1×1′ floor tile using the method of amateur telescope mirror grinding, but instead of using two pieces of glass I used two granite floor tiles. Eventually I had a ~spherical (technically, it was very slightly elliptical) convex and concave tile, and I would put grit upon the granite tile directly and grind stones to sell, and to use. This piece has a custom Tap Plastics base, which means you can’t close the custom box flush anymore, but it sure is a pleasure to use!
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’, or in this case a sharpening ~sphere, the damned thing never seems to change shape. I should know; I’d used this stone thousands of times between ~2017-2020, and checked it countless times, and 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. What it did/does do, however, is get too fine for my taste, so I used a DMT 3″ credit card thing to gently roughen up the surface, and eventually I switched to using a Rust Eraser for the same job.
The feedback off of this stone is insanely smooth for the Soft Arkansas realm, and if you just want a large bevel-setting tool for razors and other fine knives and aren’t caught up in the bevel-thinning space wars, it will be hard to find a better tool than this one. Use with Ballistol or similar oil; as you can see, the stone has a bit of staining to it from that use (I only ever used Ballistol with it, generally diluted a bit with water).
