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My new stone

Jeltz

Active Member
I picked this up cheaply on ebay while the board was closed. It seems to be a coticule but was not attached to a slate or BBW Sellers pics
2ro6uz9.jpg

14kfjwz.jpg

n2hi15.jpg

The flat figured side doesn't give a great edge but having used the dished uniform side with water the edge was very nice.
What are the pitfalls of using a dished stone as I am slightly reluctant to lap it in case I sand away the good stuff!

Any advice would be great.
 
Hi Nic, as you know I suspect this is a Les lat' (I never can spell the name right) and I believe your results confirm that, the figured sides can be rather tricky to achieve good results with, whilst the plain sides are a joy to use, I would take the great edge you produced on the dished side and give it a couple of sets of 30 X strokes with water on the figured (Hybrid) side, if it is a Les lat' you should find the edge slightly smoother and softer feeling on your skin, but still as sharp.

As far as the dish goes, unless it is compromising the edge I would leave well alone, or maybe just flatten it off a little, where it is nice to use a flat stone, it is imho not entirely vital

Please let me know how it goes?
 
OK I followed your advice. I have a Hermes that I'm working on (started at HHT2) and I gave it 30 laps on the dished side with water, then moved on to the hybrid side.

Now the thing is that with my other coti I get best results with a very tiny bit of pressure, this one I get good results with a similar approach on the dished side but on the "hybrid" side its dreadful. However, when I did a couple of dozen laps on the hybrid side with it barely touching there was a slight improvement from the dished side from HHT4 to HHT5 (most of the time). The shave test was good but there is still scope for improvement, but that's probably me being picky!

I know that the seller gets a lot of stuff from markets and car boot sales so this is almost certainly a vintage stone (as when it was 1st sold ;) I know they are all ancient) so I know its not really viable to ID it. I'm guessing it probably was attached to some kind of paddle originally?
 
It indeed is a Les Latneuses. I don't think there ever was a blue or slate backing. Many Les Latneuses have been, and are, sold with the "hybrid" side as a backing. The "hybrid" side was considered usable for rough sharpening, because it's so hard that you can put on considerable pressure for working a bit of damage out of the edge of a knife, chisel or plain blade. It was Gary Haywood who discovered the special qualities of this "hybrid" side for razor finishing.

The problem here is that the "regular" side of this Coticule is concave. This does have an influence on the shape of the razors bevel. As long as you use only that side for doing all the work start to finish, it would not matter. The bevel will be slightly convex, matching the curve of the hone. If you were to set the bevel on a flat stone, finishing on the concave surface will even have a small advantage, because it favors the very tip of the edge. In a manner of speaking, a concave hone does "Unicot" without the need for tape. The effect is the same.
But doing the opposite, namely: going for concave to flat, will not work well. The flat side is not able to make proper contact with the tip of a convex bevel, even if the convex is only very minor.

If you have another Coricule, my advice is to keep this one concave as is, and use it as aspecial finisher. Les Latneuses are brilliant finishers in their own right, and I believe that you are going to be very pleasantly surprised if you take a good flat bevel for 30 laps to the concave side with a very thin slurry and 30 more on water after that.
You can also use the hybrid side with a decent slurry to accomplish said "good flat bevel", and finish othe concave side. Doing it the other way round does not work, as you already experienced.

Best regards,
Bart.
 
Well, if you have another Coticule, may advice is to first try what I suggested in the last paragraph of my previous post.
1. set bevel on flat Coticule
2. 30 laps on concave Coficule with very light, almost watery slurry
3. 30 laps on concave Coticule with only water.

You may not want to lap it any longer after you experienced that edge.

Bart.
 
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