Where to buy a LARGE "bench stone" without paying a small fortune?

A

Allan DeGroot

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Jun 15, 2019
Messages
282
Hi All, I seek a large benchtop sharpening stone

I'd prefer something in the 12"x3" size range longer and wider (if possible)

It would be ideal if I could find a Hard Black Arkansas stone that size larger would be nice, say 18"x4" would be especially nice, but I don't have $200 to spend on it.

I'm not asking for exact directions, but that'd be nice if someone has them...
 
Allan DeGroot said:
but I don't have $200 to spend on it.
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A 10 x 3 can run > $200 and that is ten year old prices. I don't know what they go for now.
Guess you are out of luck.
You can always put sand paper down on a flat surface; marble tiles work from the home center. I actually do that when I need to do some heavy stock removal such as flatten the sole of a metal (bronze or cast iron) woodworking hand plane. I use belt sander belts and cut them so the strip can lay flat. There are several spray adhesives you can use to stick 'er down with.

As I recall you can get full sheets of Silicon Carbide sand paper (wet or dry) that comes with adhesive backing already on them. Obviously they come in very fine grits similar to the Black Ark stone.
 
PS: Dan's brand Hard Black Ark in a 12 x3 x1" goes for over $400
The Translucent Hard White for $550
 
Prices have gone WAY up since I last looked.

Oh well I have a couple pieces of steel stock 8-1/2"x 11" so I guess it's Adhesive emery paper for me
 
Depends on what your definition of small fortune is.
At Sharpening Supplies, they have a 11.5"x2.5"x.5" Black Arkansas for $129. Made to fit the Norton IM313. They don't list the source of the rock. I've seen people speculate that Sharpening Supplies gets their Black Arkansas from Dan's, but no idea who finishes them.
 
Well, I used to work for a company that made "Wafering saws" for the semi conductor industry, and I'm now Understanding why one of the guys was using a used machine sent back for rebuilding to slice a chunk of stone he got while visiting his In-Laws in Arkansas.

This was thirty odd years ago and it was a chunk of semi-translucent black stone.
It cut kinda slow compared to the usual Silicon Crystal they normally cut.

I now understand that chunk of stone was hard black Arkansas stone and I wish I would have asked to buy a slice.

His doing that could have even been work related, as they spent an awful lot of time mating the cutter arm assembly to the ways on the machine base.
Have you ever watched someone "dutch plane" two parts of a machine together, It defines "tedious".

As a side note my job there was to make the coolant feed assemblies that squirted a continuous stream of chip clearing coolant into the saw cut from several directions
 
if I were you I would look at the Norton combo stones ... they are pretty reasonable and you can get them in some variations depending on what steels you want to sharpen.
 
eKretz said:
I assume by "Dutch Plane" you are referring to scraping. Yes, very tedious.
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Exactly, all of us in that department were "encouraged" to search garage sales & flea markets in search of old files for the guys... I have a spackle pail of old files, but I have plans for them, plans going with the 24"x48" sheet of 3/8" brown linen Micarta that's leaning against my Freezer
 
Well there's a 12" x 3" x 3/4" Black Hard Arkansas stone by Dunston on ebay for $81, but since you mentioned Norton Abrasives, I just bought a Norton marked hard WHITE Arkansas stone off ebay for $25

If you look long enough you can often find someone selling something that has no clue what it is worth
and I've never had an irrepressible urge to educate an idiot... I just pay their asking price and move on.
The guy selling that hard white stone had it up on a Buy-it-now or best offer, I don't suffer from excessive greed so I paid the $25 rather than try to cheat him out of another $5
 
Well if it comes to that, I've got 1lb lots of various grades of carborundum


Like I've said before I'm a packrat. :O

I'm actually more worried it will get damaged(broken) in shipping.

But the stone appears NEW and the seller has a stack of them and as I just noticed a link to the auction appears in the strip of ads at the bottom of the page... But as you're a "Gold Member" you don't see the ads, do you?
 
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