Help Identifying Bench Stone

[HomerLee]

Picked up this "Soft Arkansas Bench Stone" at an estate sale. I thought it would be easy to find out what grit it is but I have not come up with anything. Woodcraft apparently no longer carries this line of stones. What I did find is that color (off white/tan) is no help.

The partial store label is on the back where the following can be read: Price $28.99, 07G21, partial number ending in 251, and a bar code with 033467 beneath. Googled all of them and came up empty handed.

Thanks

[Jonathan S]

Natural Arkansas stones are not classified by grit but by density. There is some good info at danswhetstone.com Norton suggests that a soft ark falls out somewhere around a 600 grit water stone. I keep a soft ark in the kitchen, seems fine for general kitchen knives.

Jonathan

[Rob Young]

Jonathan S said:

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Natural Arkansas stones are not classified by grit but by density. There is some good info at danswhetstone.com Norton suggests that a soft ark falls out somewhere around a 600 grit water stone. I keep a soft ark in the kitchen, seems fine for general kitchen knives.

Jonathan

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+1. Oil stones in general are not listed by grit but by density however with historically significant names.

Unless you are planning to do a lot of chisel/plane/tool rehab, you can get by pretty much with a "soft Ark" and a "hard Ark" (sometimes call black, translucent or surgical). Add to that a leather strop and you are all set for the rest of your working life.

Hollow grinding is also helpful with oil stones, but not entirely necessary.

Maintain on the strop, do a little bit heavier touch-up with the hard and fall back to the soft when you need to remove metal to reshape from a nick or otherwise fix a bevel. Then back to the hard and strop.

p.s. a power strop of some kind is da' bomb for keeping an edge polished!

[Bibliophile 13]

Soft is a sort of medium grit, more or less. Like has been said above, these stones aren't graded by grit, so it's hard to figure out from the labels how they would compare to stones of other kinds.

Back in the day, a soft Arkansas stone might have been used between the grindstone and the hard stone or strop. I use mine between a coarse diamond stone and a strop. You can raise a burr with it, but it takes a while, especially with the harder steels.

[AHill]

The real test is just to use the stone and judge how it compares to stones you already use. Not all Arkansas stones are created equal. There can be very wide variations between two different stones marketed as the same. That's just what you get with natural stones. Woodcraft still sells soft Arkansas stones, but now they are "Pinnacle" branded. I'm guessing they probably just changed the name on the box. The Pinnacle soft Arky got pretty good reviews on the Woodcraft website.

[enjuneer]

I bought one of these stones from Woodcraft in the early 1990's. I still use it for straightening out the edge on my hunting knives before doing the final honing on a hard Arkansas stone. As the other guys said, it is a medium grit and takes off material quickly.

[Timberwolf]

Quote:

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The real test is just to use the stone and judge how it compares to stones you already use. Not all Arkansas stones are created equal.

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Absolutely right!!