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Black Arkansas

A

Alberta Ed

Joined
Jun 29, 1999
Messages
10,208
A long time ago (I'm 67) I inherited a 14" long Black Arkansas bench hone from one of my great-uncles, a cabinet maker. Nowadays I use DMTs 99% of the time, mostly on high carbide steels like D2, S30V, S35Vn, but nothing puts a biting edge on my high carbon blades (1070, 52100, Carbon V) like that old Black Arkansas. I was touching up a bunch of them today and decided to see how my Emerson CQC7-A (CM154), shaving sharp after a session on the DMTs, would work on that stone. Must not be a lot of hard carbides in CM154, because it worked beautifully, creating a finished edge past scarey sharp. Has anyone else found anything comparable?
 
Black Arkansas stones were used for years to sharpen scaples for surgery till they came up with disposables.

I got one last year in a box of stuff at a estate sale, it marked Barbers Choice. I got my old hickory butcher Knifes scary sharp with it.
 
14" is a nice length of good black stone! How wide is your stone? I used my black 8x3 tonight as my finishing stone.

Chris
 
Arks have gotten kind of an undeserved bad rep these days - mostly because people don't take the time to learn to use them properly. Everybody wants everything done yesterday and as easily as possible anymore. I have a few Arks among my many many stones and I love them.
 
It's about 3" wide and 1.5" thick. Lovely hunk of stone. Polished a lot of blades on that thing.
 
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