Japanese Knife Sharpening Chat is Here!

"JKS (Japanese Knife Sharpening) Chat" is coming your way!

I decided to give group chat a try. I'm going to start doing a weekly online chat that'll likely be held on Friday nights for 2 hrs.


I'm thinking that with all of the phone calls, emails, and PM's I get that have to do with sharpening questions that there's bound to be a whole lot more questions not being asked so I figured this might be a fun venue to explore. It'll give people a chance to ask me questions and discuss sharpening with others at the same time - in real time.
I'm thinking about kicking it off this upcoming Friday night (Sept 4th) say 8-10 EST USA. More details to follow...

Nagura - what's it really for?

Nagura stones are often seen packaged with synthetic polishing stones. They can be useful tools if you understand what, and what not, to use them for.

The unfortunate thing is that they're often sold under the idea that they should be used to create mud/slurry (combo of stone particles & water) on the stone's surface. I believe the idea of doing this would be to create a finer breakdown of stone particles thus making the polishing stone more effective. The reality is that this isn't what happens at all, and in fact what does happen is that you'll make a slurry of mud that mostly contains the grit particles from the nagura stone rather than the polishing stone. Since many of these nagura stones are rated in the 600x range this would then have the effect of sharpening on a 600x polishing stone which of course makes no sense at all.

I believe that the use of nagura stones to create a slurry comes from using natural waterstones (versus synthetics) which would be OK if a natural nagura was used as well where the two were picked and paired up specifically to work in this manner with one another. This is a whole other subject though as there are many natural naguras available which vary greatly in quality much like full size natural stones do and picking from this vast (expensive) selection is just a bit out of reach for most of us. See a small selection of natural nagura stones pictured.

So back to the world of synthetic naguras and what they're actually used for...

A common use for a nagura is stone cleaning where you would de-glaze or refresh the surface of a polishing stone as it becomes dirty. Personally I don't bother with this myself because I've found that by the time a stone is dirty enough to warrant cleaning it often warrants flattening as well. I prefer the kill two birds with one stone approach here and go straight for the flattening plate.


I find that their best use is to refinish (or smooth) the surface texture of a polishing stone after it's been flattened by a coarser means such as a DMT D8XX (120x) diamond plate. Smoothing the surface down brings more contact area of the stone to the blade making the polishing stone work more effectively. My 1-2 punch for stone flattening is to use the ATOMA 140x Diamond Plate followed by our 6000x Synthetic Nagura stone If you already have a diamond plate and a nagura then try it out for yourself as you might find, like myself, that this is a good way to deal with the chore of stone flattening.