Sharpening Stones

Use a magnifying glass. Sounds like you need one anyway. ;-)

If it is coarse/fine and you really can't tell by inspection, you can hear/feel the difference when sharpening something as the fine side is smoother in operation.

Some of this may depend on the quality of the stones. I have two of these two sided stones. One was a present, whose source I do not know, but it has a distinctly different pair of surfaces that are easily told apart: this is how stones 'always used to be' in my memory at least. My other one is a cheapo, from Wilkinson's, and it is indeed more difficult to tell the sides apart, and it also gives a sickly rubbery smell when in use.

So it looks like it pays to buy a good brand.

I've gone over to diamond coated steel plates for my occasional chisel sharpening.

Try Arkansas oilstones - reputedly the best and highly prized when I was a very young apprentice chippie!

I've taken to this also, including a few strokes to the carving knife prior to cutting the Sunday joint.

AJH

Spamlet wrote: My other one is a

That sounds familiar. I'll give you one guess where I bought mine from :-)

I might like to add that there are probably different grades of two-sided stones too. My dad's one - probably still in use! - had the typical pink hard honing surface on one side and fairly coarse grey on the other. No mistake possible there (they used to have similar things on a smaller scale inside the old Ronson razor boxes that used to be found in vast numbers at jumble sales...). On the other hand, a met lab that kept my fingers well ground down polishing all sorts of metal prior to hardness testing, had a row of stones on an inclined plane with water permanently running down it. Going through the grades, a mirror finish was nearly obtained, and then made good on a lapping wheel with diamond paste (spectacular results when odd shaped magnet cores dug into the spinning fabric and were hurled across the room...)

What I really used to like were the little 'Tam-o-Shanter' green, spotty, honing sticks, which I used to find so useful for putting the final finish on all kinds of edges (including my finger nails, to get just the right sound from a nylon guitar string...). Sadly, these seem to have disappeared: I did track down a web reference to the firm and write to it a year or three ago, but never got any reply.

Ho hum.

Got two - one, highly treasured, from my grandfather. The other from an unknown source, i.e. picked out of a rubbish heap in a WWII bunker.

Lovely stones but a little on the small side.

Richard