Oilstones & Honing Stones

An oilstone is a bonded abrasive bar used to cut, refine and finish a hard surface by hand or in a fixture. In practice our customers use them for three jobs: bringing a worn cutting edge back to shape, honing a bore to size and roundness, and lapping a flat face to a controlled finish.

Silicon carbide and white fused alumina are the materials we work with most often, and other materials and colours can be produced to customer requirement. Oilstones are made by mixing graded abrasive with a binder, pressing the mix to shape and sintering it, then cutting and grinding the result to final dimensions. What separates a good stone from a mediocre one is not the chemistry on paper — it is whether the grit is distributed evenly and whether the hardness is the same in the first bar and the thousandth.

Sharpening oilstones — rectangular bars in a range of grits, used for edge maintenance on knives, blades, chisels and cutting tools.

Honing stones — narrower and often longer bars used with a honing fixture or by hand to true up and finish cylindrical bores.

Non-standard profiles — stones cut to a drawing or a sample: special cross-sections, stepped profiles, radiused edges and other shapes that a standard catalogue does not cover.

To quote accurately we need three things: the product type, the grit you want, and the dimensions in millimetres. If you have a drawing, a photo or a sample of the stone you are currently using, that is even better — we can match it directly.

Sizes do not have to be exact. A rough figure is enough for us to start; we will confirm the details with you before anything is produced.