Very nice, congrats! Yeah that looks like a la grise to me. Good stones. I really wish I hadn't sold mine. You're building quite the collection there.
Haven't gotten a chance to play much with this since it arrived the same day as a mystery hone; but here's the oil-crusted score I posted a few days ago.
The feel is exactly like modern La Veinette. Not quite as nice as the peach-hued, unpatterned vintages (Old Rock, etc); but a very good stone in its own right. The BBW is beautiful, can't really capture it in my crappy pictures. Really deep and multifaceted coloring. The exciting part though is that big thick slab of combo in the middle. I'm actually looking forward to getting to try that out in the future. It's a little guy, but still a nice little score.
Possibly? I'd have to see a side shot of your stone. In my experience La Grise tend to transition slowly from coti to bbw, giving a sort of dimmer switch effect in the hybrid area (Where I suspect yours was cut, never reaching the 100% BBW rock). This stone doesn't, it has distinct divisions; Top layer of uniform Yellow Coti, Second Layer Uniform Hybrid, Third layer Uniform BBW. An example of a La Grise doing this slow transition would be that "Les Latneuses" eBay auction we laughed about a few pages back.
.... The exciting part though is that big thick slab of combo in the middle. I'm actually looking forward to getting to try that out in the future....
Just because I've not used one before. Excited to see what it's like. More Coti-like, More BBW-like, Something different from either? I'll have to wait and see. I generally don't use BBW, see no advantage over yellow coticule. So I'm curious if the Hybrid will be different.
Maybe in the future, as it is I've got about ten new hones to keep me busy for the next few weeks already, so I'm in no rush on the hybrid. If you want a razor honed though, feel free to shoot it my way and I'll get an edge on it for you. I just dumped about a hundred of my beater blades on eBay, so I'm running out of spare razors to hone when I just want to play around. I've been honing 2-3 knives every day just to keep myself entertained.
And don't forget that adding a fairly narrow one could indeed be seen as "narrowing down my hone collection"Ive been thinking about narrowing down my hone collection soon so naturally I have to stock up first
Nice hone. It's not two layers blending, as the layers aren't arranged like that (they run roughly parallel/in a bullseye arrangement to each other at intervals in the mine); it's just one layer that's a bit darker in a section.
You have a 175x10 mm les lat??