In an earlier posting about my osoraku dagger, I made a comment to the effect that rocks are pretty yawn-riffic. “Ha ha ha,” laughed the fates and fired up their favorite app: “Comeuppance”

In [stderr] Senior Aggregate Executive badland rebutted my point thus (edited for brevity):

feral hissing

It was not long after my sloppy comment that I noticed that my softish binsui (medium coarse) stone sure was wearing fast, and if I kept wearing the little bastards down, then buying more from Japan, I might eventually get on a certain radar screen and there would be protective tariffs for Arkansas stones, etc. Ever since I scrambled it, this is how my brain works: A is interesting, B is interesting, and that means we need to research the hell out of G. Naturally I wondered if there is anything special about Arkansas stones (I assume they’re inbred and wear red hats?)* Uh, oh, it turns out that rocks are actually interesting. For one thing, there would be fewer castles like Kerak Des Chevaliers without rocks, and the Egyptian pyramids would be much less notorious if they had been mounds of sand.

It almost certainly wouldn’t occur to anyone that shipping off a tariff-boosted $300 to Japan for rocks wouldn’t make me wonder why binsui stones were expensive, anyway. A decent-sized tanto blade would consume most of one. I often share old-time production videos with my dad (we can’t get enough of it!) including a spectacular series on how millstones are made in the 60s.

There are videos (converted from 6mm film) of little me, helping bring in the wheat harvest with oxen, from southern France, around the same time. The characters in that movie are instantly recognizable to me – I even know what they smell like, though dad and I are pretty sure they’re northerners, but literally everything about them is familiar, including the waist bands (can’t afford to fix a hernia and every working man has one), the caps, etc. Anyhow, the curiousity built up to the point where I asked GPT “do you have any strata assays for Clearfield county that indicate locations where good sharpening stones might be found?” I don’t know if you noticed but hauling something like that millstone is not a Fun Task. It stands to reason that our planet is made of a lot of sandstone and whatnot, it’s just a question of where.

[By the way, I am very very familiar with the “Rock Pun” sedimentary threads, and let me please request the comment sections not be completely formed of rock puns. I mean, do what you gotta do, but go for quality not quantity in honor of this topic] Anyhow, GPT gave me a couple of interesting pages of stuff about local strata of novaculite, and oil shale, which would be pretty good and I opined that the strip mine 2 miles from my shop might be a fun drive-by.

(shredded wood for eventual topsoil) – Look! ROCKS! and the best part is that they have already been blown up, crushed, shattered and stacked. I know that rocks, in their natural form, can be disturbingly large and aggressive if teased. This sort of thing is a blessing and a curse because it’s got some of everything but there’s no locality left. So, if I found something that was 100% compatible with Japanese uchigomori I would still not be rich – I’d have to find more. Anyhow, it was interesting enough to get out of the truck for a look-see. GPT had made its usual list of good suggestions including that I take an old file, so I could see how any interesting rocks gummed up the teeth, or resisted a file, or attacked.

Then, I started finding a lot of “Pennsylvania Yard Rock” AKA: Binsei PA. a coarse, approximately 80 grit, stone with lots of quartzite in it (hard stuff) in a matrix of clay (goo) – basically, that’s very very close to what a sneaky Japanese stone-monger will sell you for $150 if it’s squared off and has a cool label. So, I stole a few chunks of various rocks – probably 130lb or so, maybe $.03 worth.

Some of this stuff turned out, actually, to be pretty darned awesome. Hence, my apology to badland. I hauled a few pieces around and tested them on a spare katana blade I had lying around. It turned out that it’s basically the same as a Japanese rock that cost $80 plus shipping. I also spent a while figuring out how to cut it (I know, chisel: hammer) I had a pretty goodly collection and spent some happy time cutting rocks and breathing dust and generally making a great mess out of everything while remaining conscious that (in principle) I was blasting abrasive all over everything and that I really should not wipe my glasses on my Tshirt.

Then, The very next day I discovered this one super-sweet rock that was smooth as butter, made a delicious creamy clay, cut steel pretty fast, and was a fairly effective 200-grit foundation stone. Once I knew what I was looking for, I was able to go to the rock pile and steal a couple hundred pounds of that, and some other stuff. No, I did not swing by The Louvre in my distinctively dust-and-red colored truck (as if it would fit through Paris!).

All of this piqued a sort of excitement in me. I was doing what I love: learning useless stuff with no responsibility behind it. I now had a pile of neat looking beach rocks – it was time to give them away. So, I went to the post office and grabbed a dozen flat rate boxes. For $21 they’ll ship a box of rocks to anywhere in the US. I shipped 2 loads of boxes totalling around 75kg. In the process of doing this, I learned all kinds of crazy useless information, but really I was just setting my merest toe over the gigantic abyss of useless information that is Japanese-style sword polishing! Because of how the left-over flan in my skull seems to work, I can get very fixated on things, to the point where it’s hard to know where to stop. In other words, some of me is still the same. I have also developed a whole set of techniques for shaping hard rock with an angle grinder and a diamond wheel, that I’m pretty sure Japanese rock-shapers of old would have given a lot for.

You may not realize what a horrible thing it is, to get me interested in a topic. There is often collateral damage. I realized in the 1980s that the reason things are “interesting” is because they are connected to other things. So, in order to master an “interesting” topic you have to learn not just the thing but all the things connected to the things. But what does “connected” even mean? It means that there is some sort of underlying guiding theory that can explain how A somehow B because otherwise you’re being religious. This is true for all B unless all of physics is wrong. Those underlying guiding theories can be correct, or incorrect, but what’s fun is they can be verified to some degree or another. Hey, the relative amount of those sparkly things in a non-diamond sedimentary rock (those are quartzite) will affect the speed of how it cuts metal based on the quantity, and how evenly based on the distribution. Etc. Anyhow, I have been messing with this stuff for long enough that I went back to the 3 blades I need to polish, and suddenly whole new vistas of theory began exploding before me. The clay-ey stone produced a completely different effect from the less clay-ey stone. What the hell?

 

Well, well, well, – you can see the temper line on the left, because it’s much more deeply scratched than the right near the ridge-line (shinogi-ji) You can even see the hardness transitions in the flat. And you can see on the ridge-line that there are places that I simply haven’t hit on yet. I could give you a 4 hour lecture from that one photo, but I won’t. Anyhow, the edge, inside the temper-line (hamon) has scratches going in different directions because it has been hit with a variety of tools on the harder metal than the flat. So it’s more burnishing the finish than polishing it. See there are angled strikes, which are probably from the belt sander long ago, and straight deep ones most likely from a diamond stone. The ridge-line also carries hard-edged strikes, again probably that diamond block. But what about the shiny area with the diamond strikes? That’s an area that a lazy sword-polisher missed. So, what you do is start polishing the flat, but push your intentionality toward the shinogi-ji. After a bit, the line there becomes as sharp and as crisp as your stone is straight and flat. Please read that a few times. It took me dozens to write, so you owe me. Now look at the very bottom of where the shinogi-ji is leaving the picture frame – there’s an area that’s sharp and crisp on the flat/edge side but has an un-matte area on the other side. Well, if I polish with just a few strokes with my intention on the shinogi-ji, that line will pop off the surface like it was made on a CNC machine and polished with conspiracy theory dust. Like:

The flatter and smoother my rocks are, they correct themselves along both edges and the shinogi-ji becomes sharper and shinier. It must. When you understand this, it all starts to fall in place. Think back up to the blade with the big matte spots right behind the hamon – what are they? Simple: the abrasive mud is sharp enough to cut that metal, which is unhardened, and give it a matte surface, while the hamon just gets a little shinier. Where it gets fun: there’s a different way of approaching each edge on each type of blade, which is why someone who polishes long-swords (katana) and short-swords (wakizashi) might prefer not to polish a dagger (tanto) There are about a dozen blade geometries for those, and only about 6 for the swords. As the polishing block gets finer, the line gets more crisp.

So I get to this state where my blades look I have polished them with a chocolate bar, which is where the class in sword-polishing that I took, did not go. Naturally, I did what I usually do, which is proposed a theoretical framework (the metal matting because of differential hardness) to GPT and listened to what it had to tell me.

And, of course, it told me what I should have expected, which is, since this is a process developed by the Japanese there is an infinite stack of layers of things you have to do in the right order, precisely, or you’ll have a scratch specific to step #8 which will be unremovable unless you go back to step #6. Not quite, but, maybe I am not entirely joking. Anyhow, it turns out that I’m pretty close to being able to go for a final polish, but any scratches I missed 3 steps ago will re-appear with little LED spotlights on them and a Rammstein stage show. I have come to understand, though, why a Japanese-trained master swordmaker can be handed a modern sword made by some well-meaning guy on the internet, and they just smile, “yes, indeed” and pass it back.

Anyhow, I have a new appreciation for rocks. And now I am mind-blown by the many sword-polishers in the world who figured this stuff out, and learned to make these glittering bars of death as glittery as they could be.

Oh, and, yes I did ship 10 flat-rate boxes full of rocks. It’s still not as bad as the anchor chain (iron is a lot heavier than rock!!) and I complained that the anchor chain box had broken open and wanted them to check for damage.

* I am not up to date with Arkansas class consciousness, really, so I shouldn’t touch that topic, either. But in case someone is about to write me a lengthy rebuttal like badland’s, please remember [stderr] I have a few historical credentials that allow me to survive (?) any rough-and-tumble in the comment section about class consciousness.

There is a video I saw somewhere, maybe Instagram, of some old-school whetstone makers. I had an epiphany when I saw one moment in it, where the guy has a thing like a hacksaw (OK) with a bronze or copper blade (OK) and at one point he pulls out a hammer with a kind of pick-like reverse-end, and starts banging a small tight line up the blade. Naturally, as a blade guy, I was about to freak out until I realized that that’s how you sharpen a bronze rock saw. I bet that somewhere in some Egyptian shop manual are instructions for how to do that. As the internet lapses farther into stupidity, Instagram keeps getting crap like “wow look at this really square rock! there is no way ancient humans could have cut that!!! therefore: ALIENS!” I suspect an ancient Egyptian artisan would have fetched him a tremendous clout upside the head.

In the same vein, this is a thing I saw that may never cease to delight me. It was a comment someone posted on Instagram saying that he and his new wife were discussing doing some tourism now that they were married. He mentioned Stonehenge, as it is a) a very british place and b) stone, etc. His wife apparently looked at him agape for a minute and finally managed to mutter, “your ancestors must have been weak and stupid.” That was when he remembered that she was Egyptian. I have a Chinese friend I have been discussing touring the USA with, and I realized that for someone who grew up with the Forbidden City less than an hour away by high speed rail, the USA is not going to be very impressive. We are at the weak and stupid stage, right now.

I’m pretty sure, now, that rocks have other uses than just sharpening things. They could be used to revolutionize structural engineering, maybe?

Given how expensive rocks are, why did they make a whole planet out of them? They should have used flan.