OHIRA SUITA

INTERPRETATION OF THE STONE

This Ohira Suita was another dense stone in the group of three in this recent batch, Strong cutting speed, polishing power, produces its own mud easily and has a fluid, smooth feeling under the blade across the entire stone. Having a light pattern across the stone that was not felt durable polishing but aided in edge sharpening.

A medium hard a bit in the harder side. The stone quickly forms a dark grey mud easily with great feeling and ease of use. The mud has a silky texture that gave a fluidity to each pass. I started the stone off with a surface texture from a 600 atoma but I found any finer or polished surface could work depending on the desired stage in polishing such as shiro nagura or Kuro nagura.

One technique I found worked best with this type of stone was to use very litter on the stone and bring up a mud with pressure on the soft iron, then instead of adding water to the stone when needed add a bit of water to the blade just to lightly wet it.

Working well across all types of carbon steel and soft iron cladding as well as Honyaki, when pushed further the stone started to bring out grain and texture in hardened carbon steel. I found that this stone gave a mirror polish with a light haze on the hard steel and a fine Kasumi finish with detail in the soft cladding.

Equally it excelled in edge sharpening and sharpening of Japanese woodworking tools.

An overall excellent stone suitable for fine polishing and edge sharpening.

Included is a Ohira Nagura to give a thicker Kasumi finish if desired