Doubt you'll hear much from them in shavingdoms' cyberspace, but rest assured, a silent Gülenist secret society army of razor-bevel-concaving fools is out there, slinking in the shadows, and one planned day coming all at once for your flat whetstones. They just don't want to hear any retorts from gssixgun, steve56, daltongang, and the rest of the 'flat earth society'.
This ~10x4x0.6″ Belgian blue whetstone includes a birch box and ~4×1.6×0.6″slurry stone”. One of its two 4x10" surfaces has been made convex as an ellipse, with an approximate effective diameter of ~6.5'Ø across the 4" width, and ~25'Ø across the 10" length. The "slurry" stone has been shaped the inverse way.It makes a simply glorious natural whetstone for the kitchen that can also set up and refine a razor!
In so shaping this stone, I removed ~3.3mm of the original stone’s ~16-17mm corners’ thickness, and put 1.75 hrs hard labor into the task.
I concave-shaped the slurry stone to be the ‘anti’ shape to the bench stone so that you can maintain the geometric form of your hone for years at home without having to buy the special lapping plate. That’s what the German grinders all do from what I’ve seen, they like to hand-sculpt a gently-convex whetstone and then when they get it the way they like it they take sandpaper wrapped tight around the top of their finished bench stone and use that to concave a little rubbing stone.
With a shape of 4×10″ for the bench stone, face the 4″ axis of your stone for establishing a bevel on your knives, keeping the spine low so you carve in a bevel with good concavity upon it, just like if you had access to a very fine wheel. At some point, you will switch the way you move on the bench stone so that you face down the 10″ axis, and this will immediately go toward the knife edge’s apex. Alternatively you could stay facing the 4" axis longer, but raising the spine. When you get that apex the way you like, strop the knife or finish briefly on a hard rod and you’ll have a durable apex with a concave bevel-rear.
For use with a straight razor, I would set the razor facing the 4" axis, refine facing the 10" axis, top off for a bit on the flat 4x10" 'under' side, and then take to a pasted strop briefly, before a regular unpasted strop.
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