The day has come. I finally worked my Gesshin 220 pink brick down to a pink wafer and it no longer peaks above my stone holder even with the shims I made lifting it up. You have served me well, my friend. May you rest in peace.
My replacement stone is already standing by in the permasoak tub, ready for new adventures!
All of these showed up in the last 24 hrs, I usually like to wait to post until I have a chance to use the stones and document the finish they leave but I couldn’t contain my excitement.
From top to bottom:
- Uchigumori bench stone
- Vnat from Zao that’s purportedly similar to Uchigumori
- Vnat from Zao that’s purportedly similar to Shiro suita
- Umegahata Aisa (3.5 hardness)
- Shohonyama fine Aoto
The uchi obviously needs to be lapped which is gonna take a while, but I’ll get a nice sized pile of uchi powder as a reward for my efforts. Photos 2 and 3 show it dry and wet respectively, look at all that renge! Massive thanks to u/pchiggs for helping me track that one down.
The Aisa currently has a toxic line on the sharpening surface but looking at the sides of the stone I think I can lap past it without losing too much height. I bought that one on a whim because the price was right and I was curious about Aisa, time will tell whether or not I find it useful.
The Aoto I’m really excited about, I have two stones from that stratum so far and they could not be more different from each other. One is in the 1-2k range and is great for edges and the other is in the 3-5k range and is a standout polisher. Both are quite narrow and this one is much wider, Ikkyu estimated the grit range to be somewhere around 5k.
A question for the hive mind: what’s your favorite method for sealing stones? I just ran out of the polyurethane spray-on lacquer I’ve been using and while I like how it performs I am curious as to what other folks here are using. I know I don’t have the patience for cashew lacquer, even though it looks beautiful.
I’ll do a more detailed review once I get a chance to test all these out, thanks for reading!