Progress

Hazuya and jizuya finger stones are not as insurmountable as I thought. I am not going to call myself a master of the craft, but I do know that I am learning things. That is one of the best things about hobbies that involve crafting or fine art: you get to observe your progress over time.

Last week, I was working with finger stones and all I was getting out of them were lovely fine scratch patterns on the surface of the blade that I was using as practice. This week, I can start to see how those micro-scratches move toward the indescribable finish on a properly polished Japanese sword. While the polishing that I’m doing is far from perfect, it is vastly better than what I was doing before.

What I learned looks like this:

1. When books and websites discuss this sort of polishing, they tell you that the stones must be ground down to (what seems like) paper-thin chips. It makes a difference. Why? I don’t know. All I know is that when I tried it, the finish started to improve.

2. You can’t just use water as a lubricant in this stage of the process. According to “The Art of Japanese Sword Polishing” (ISBN:978-4-7700-2494-7) you have to use “tojiro paste”. That is like the slurry that nagura stones build up on other stones, but using only the highest quality natural stones that you have. Uchigumori grade, at the very least.

Don’t try to flout 800 years of tradition. This step is absolutely necessary as well.

3. This sort of polishing will take longer than you really wish it would. You may end up needing 3 or more jizuya stones of different hardnesses. You’ll probably want to collect as many specimens of Narutaki (raw material for jizuya) as you can. Every stone and every flake are different.

4. No, this will take a long time. It will tire out your hand and shoulder.

5. Go out and buy that book. It is a good overview, even if it isn’t quite the in-depth examination of the craft as one might like.

6. Get good stones. Use clean water.

7. You have to practice a lot. Don’t be afraid of taking your metal back down to a koma-nagura polish and start over.

The other thing that exploring this is teaching me is this: traditional polishing of this kind is a true art and it adds (and SHOULD) a lot to the price of modern swords.

Polishing steps are dependent on perfection

This weekend, I learned more about hazuya and jizuya, as well as polishing in general. What I learned was that polishing in a traditional or hybridized fashion require that each stage be perfect before you move on to the next.

Machine polishing is somewhat more forgiving, I think, than doing it by hand.

Every step in hand polishing must entirely remove the scratch pattern of the step before it. It sounds simple, but without the right lighting, you will never see whether or not you’ve really accomplished the task. If you don’t catch those remaining flaws, keep progressing into finer and finer grits, you’ll end up with a lovely finish that has gouges or micro-scratches in it.

Then you get to start over.

Finger polishing, hazuya and jizuya, absolutely require that the surface they are used on is flawless. They will bring out every flaw you didn’t see. Then you get to start over.

There is an issue of pressure with finger stones, in that I do not know precisely how much pressure to use to get the best results. As near as I can tell, no one talks about that part. I imagine that if they did, it would be in flowery and semi-useless terms.

“You must touch the blade with the stone like a cherry blossom falling onto the stepping stone in the pond.”

“Like Spring rain on the grass.”

“Like a Sumo wrestler eating tempura.”

You get the idea.

Sharpening Tip #1

When sharpening knives using Iyoto stone as the whetstone, remember to keep the blade clean. Have a towel nearby so that you can wipe the luscious slurry from the blade as it accumulates.

I say this because that slurry is both the best thing about these stones and it is also quite dangerous to you if you don’t wipe it off. Remember, it LUBRICATES as well as polishes. I discovered this last night while sharpening a friend’s set of Global kitchen knives.

There were quite a few close calls where the edge that I was busy refining came within a gnat’s ass of laying open my fingers. Thank goodness that I was both paying attention and using the ninja reflexes that I’ve gained over the years. Bleeding all over a wonderful person’s condo isn’t a great way to garner repeat business.

On a technical note, for people in search of good kitchen knives. Global makes an impressive knife. Zero ground, convex edge polish. Flexible, light, and capable of a throbbingly keen edge. Low point: COST! They’re pricey.

If someone asks you if you’re a Knife Geek… You say, “Yes!”

Paraphrased from “Ghostbusters,” of course.

I’m here at work, and I just reached into my desk drawer to grab a chunk of whetstone to tweak the edge of my pocket knife. For just a second, I looked at what I was reaching for in an objective sort of way.

In a little box in my drawer are fragments of five kinds of Japanese water stones. Iyomeshime Arinoki. Iyomeshime Uebi (I think). Narutaki Suita. Uchigumori Suita. Yamashiromeito. That’s pretty geeky.

Don’t ask about the jewelry grade polishing paper in the other drawer. Please.

I guess I should be happy that I can take some of my interests almost anywhere I go. Right now, though, I feel like a geek.

Steel and Stones

I’ve loved knives for as long as I can remember. Sharp ones.

I was around sharpening for most of my childhood, in one way or another. My father carved wood, and my mother believed in sharp kitchen knives. As soon as I was old enough to get a knife of my own, I wanted to learn how to sharpen them.

Knife collecting started in 1991, and the seed for learning to make knives was planted on the same day that I bought my first “major” knife. A Spyderco Endura.

This was at a gun show in Annapolis, Maryland. At that show, I also met a knifemaker named Kirby Van De Griek. He was doing nice stuff, so we started talking.

Over the years, I kept running into him at one event or another, and we ended up working for the same goldsmith at the Maryland Renaissance Festival in 1996. He was apprenticing, and I was working on the sales floor. The friendship kept growing, as did my desire to learn knifemaking from him. We never got around to it.

He was killed in a motorcycle accident July 6th, 2002. Not only did I lose someone who was like a brother to me, I also lost a potential teacher.

I still had my love of sharpening and kept learning whatever I could about the craft, even if I couldn’t make knives.

2007 rolled around, along with some personal epiphanies. I got involved with the Blacksmiths Guild of the Potomac (bgop.org), and took their basic smithing class. That’s when I started devouring information about how to make knives. I’ve lost count of all the blades I’ve broken, but I’ve never lost sight of how much I want to do this.

Last year, my blades started to survive. This year, out of all the knives I’ve done, only 3 have broken during quenching. I also created my first serious ART knife.

Pretty eventful, eh? I think so, too.

The love of sharpening is still here, witnessed by the fact that I vend at a local event twice a year doing just that. That love of the sharpening process has metamorphosed into a love of good sharpening stones. After all, you can’t do your best work without good tools!

Out of all of the stones I’ve used, there isn’t anything else that comes close to the finesse that Japanese water stones can bring to an edge. Before I owned any, I spent a lot of time searching for them at prices that didn’t leave me squealing in fiscal agony. The luck was not with me for quite a long time.

Eventually, almost by accident, I found someone on Ebay who was selling them for something less than a painful amount. I bid and won one. It was as good as I hoped it would be.

With a little more effort, I was able to find a vendor in Japan who could supply me with almost any sort of natural stone I could imagine. I’ve bought more since, and am never less than pleased at how well they work and what they allow me to do with an edge.

This is where I am, in my personal life, finding happiness with steel and stones.

Rocks that are kicking my ass

I got raw material for hazuya and jizuya from my supplier. For people who aren’t deep into the lingo of Japanese sword polishing, these are stones that are used in the final polishing steps, cut down to fingernail size and moved with the pad of your thumb.

Yes, it sounds profoundly odd in this day of buying metal polish at your auto parts store, but this is how those amazing finishes on those swords were done before life was convenient.

The goal of using these stones is to both bring up the inherent characteristics of the steel and to polish out micro-scratches left behind from the last full-size stones that were used on the blade. Somewhere between how fine the grain of these stones are and the amount of pressure exerted, the miracle is supposed to occur.

Alright. I can sort of see that from where I am, but my stones are leaving scratches. Especially, the jizuya.

I can definitely see how steep this learning curve is going to be.

What is Iyoto…

Iyoto stone comes from the area around Iyo in the Ehime Prefecture in Japan. Records show that iyomeshime has been used for polishing blades since the Nara Period, but there appears to be some anecdotal evidence that it was in use nearly 400 years earlier. (The Nara Period is around 700AD, so the recorded history of Iyoto stone spans over 1300 years!)

The mines were closed for a period of about 30 years in the last century, but were reopened and new material is slowly working into the marketplace.

Some varieties of Iyoto, of which there are several, were used as the final stone in sword polishing for about 500 years, until the Honyama mines around Kyoto became active. In the present day, and I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, Iyoto stones are part of the final series of stones foundation polishing (EDIT: looks like they might be part of the chu-nagura as well as the koma nagura).

Like all of the Japanese natural polishing stones, it is very difficult to pin down what the grit size is in order to give an accurate description of the material. The natural world didn’t provide uniform grains when these sedimentary rocks formed, unlike modern, manufactured stones that are composed of finely graded abrasives. In the case of Iyoto, the best that can be done is to provide a range of grit sizes that might be present in any given stone.

That being said, for comparison’s sake, Iyoto is somewhere between 800 grit (JIS) and 1500 grit.

The curve ball is that there are Iyoto that push into the 3000 range. For another trick pitch on top of the curve ball, that 3000 grit might come from the stone you bought as an 800 and have been using for the past few years.

The abrasive agent in Japanese water stones doesn’t break down uniformly, and the cementing particles in the lithic structure aren’t uniform either. Call it “The Miracle of Nature” or “God has a sense of humor,” but this is part of the reason why these stones are so wonderful and mysterious… You never know if the so-so rock you bought might not turn out to be the treasure of your collection as time goes on.

Many people who are familiar with synthetic or natural water stones know about the Nagura stone. It is a stone used to raise up the abrasive on fine grit water stones. It provides, with water, a thick “milk” on the surface of your stone that lubricates and polishes as you use it.

Iyoto can be used as Nagura, as well as for polishing blades. I have found that Iyoto (white and Arinoki) make a thicker paste than Nagura, and polish even better.

I just received a small shipment of Narutaki and Uchigumori stone, and I absolutely can’t wait to see what my Iyoto slurry stones will add to polishing with such fine grained stones!

I’ve just learned something worth knowing.

Now I know why Samurai swords are so sharp.

I picked up my latest shipment of stones from the PO this morning. Actually, this was 1/2 of my current shipment, but that’s less important than what was in it.

These packages contained the two Iyoto I ordered and the uchigumori material. I THINK that he sent me a large chunk of uchigumori and a large-ish piece of narutaki. The reason I think so is because the uchi is a darker gray color and is harder than the other stone. That’s about what I’m given to understand is the difference between the two.

So, for giggles, I gave an old X-acto blade a little love with one of the Iyoto, and followed it with polishing on a flat area on the narutaki. It ended up with a mirror-like surface.

How does that dull blade cut now? Scalpel-like. Better than when the blade was new.

Oh my goodness.

Iyoto slurry stone sale

 

Four iyoto stones

 

I’ve got 4 Japanese Iyoto slurry stones that would like new homes. There are two Arinoki Iyoto and two White Iyoto. The Arinoki is slightly more coarse than the white variety, and seems to break down at a slightly slower pace. White Iyoto breaks down into the gooiest polishing slurry that I’ve ever experienced.

You can also use them for sharpening small blades, or for direct blade polishing. As far as grit size goes, I’m going to fall back on what my supplier says. He says that they range from 800 JIS to around 1500, depending on the variety of Iyoto.

They are $10 each, plus shipping.

To give you a better idea of the size of these stones, here are some measurements:
A: 46mm x 50mm x 32mm, vaguely triangular shape
B: 50mm x 39mm x 40mm, triangle-ish also
C: 40mm x 55mm x 35mm, chunky rhomboid
D: 65mm x 30mm x 42mm, long rhomboid

No longer for sale. Disposed of.

Well, it looks like there’ll be 13 knives on the table

I really didn’t plan to refinish the double edge blade so soon. Really, I didn’t. It just started to come together and I had to finish it. There’s about an hour of work left before it is completely done, but it will be on the table tomorrow.

Data: hand forged 1084 high carbon steel blade; double edge with wrap-around hamon. The handle is whitetail antler with a mahogany spacer, carved triskele in the antler crown, and a brass cap underneath the little sterling silver collar around the blade. $200

Detail of the crown carving