David Weaver
.though his manners are much better than mine and sometimes I feel like I should!!

There has been a lot of blog type and vendor type information about good quality fine stones becoming scarce. I think there may have been an economic industrial viewpoint for that and Dan's has blown it away.

I am not a water carrier for anyone, so my fascination with dan's is just as a stone pig - every first quality stone I've gotten from them on the fine side, and every second I've gotten from their webpage, and several from sierra trading, etc....all of the black stones are a lot alike.

Joel had done a story at one point about the price of the norton 8x3x1/2 vs. the 8x2x<1 stone. The former was $79 and the latter was $169 or so. I asked why so high and norton's answer was that the level of waste in the full thickness stones was so high. I'm still confused as to how they have so many clear veins 1/2 inch thick but not 0.8 inches thick, especially given some narrowness of the latter type allows for less than 3" wide.

But that was the story, hard to get.

Fast forward to dan's. Dan has raised the bar on first quality stone price but the trans and black stones are the best I have ever seen anywhere. The bone colored trans in this thread is a thing of beauty. Dan's milky colored trans stones are just as fine or finer. What's the difference between Dan's and norton? I don't know for sure but dan said this:

* there is no supply issue on fine stones as long as the economic incentive is there to go deep enough to get them.

I said something about getting clear stones on the razor forum and someone who had taken a tour of dans said "no, it's not that hard - I recall seeing giant blocks of clear stone at dan's and they were slicing them into more stones". I think either the stock that dans is pulling from the deep is either clearer than nortons, or there is some labor factor that dan is willing to go to, and to finish stones where those issues that norton had aren't a dan's issue. Or both.

The person who took that tour showed me a picture of a giant billet of true hard (like 2.6+ specific gravity) material being cut on a giant table. It must've been a thousand pounds of rock. Good mostly clear looking wonderful material.