Well, though it is still a task of pure misery however long you’re on the clock, the magical Z-Lion 210x297mm sheet of diamonds really helped cut down on the labor time.  That's essentially just a really costly $$$ sheet of magic super-sandpaper, and there’s no telling how many fastballs that dude’s got in him before he’s lost a step, but I was able to beat up a dozen or so bench stones and a similar number of slurry stones, including some Arks before the 12x18cm sheet seemed to notably slow (but still it cuts!), so I'll wager vs these 2x6" soft and hard Arks I can get a dozen or so hard battles in the books before you're starting to see notable creep in the battle.  Or so I hope.

Nonetheless, we have here a 2x6x1″ Dan’s Soft Arkansas Stone, and one of its 2×6″ surfaces has been shaped to become a 6.5’Ø primary axis ellipse, with a 25’Ø secondary axis.  I bonked the sink faucet tap at my office once with the stone, not very hard, but with a brittle-hard thing like a soft Ark, any such collision’s sure to cost a railing’s beauty contest, so I’ve shown you here with the outlines.  It isn’t a big deal in any way, and if I somehow make these fights with 100% perfection for all edges of the railings, which ain’t easy, its silly rarity will bear a penalty in cost.

With other rocks, I’ll often make an ‘anti’ stone to the inverse shape of the bench stone, for your geographical upkeep needs instead of buying the costly plate.  But I can assure you, for reasons I do not understand but are detailed on a special eev blog by some crazy guy that I am certain does know more than I on the topic, when you shape a soft Ark to become ‘a sharpening ellipse’, the damned thing never seems to change shape.  I should know; I have a 2.5x10″ soft Ark in my office which I should rightly sell, because it was based on my original shaping ‘invention’ of a 1x1′ granite tile with a broad, large-diameter ellipse concavity (that only concaves the bevel gently, a razor can take much more concaving than such a shape can impart, you want a shape such as this thing, or an even shorter primary diameter!)

I’d used that thing thousands of times, literally multiple thousands, between ~2017-2020, and I have checked it countless times, never once did I ever get to observe a flattening at the ‘dead center spot’ of the stone’s pitch, like you’d presume would happen at least in surface texture on a hard/trans Ark.  It just doesn’t happen on the soft Ark; it keeps on wearing evenly, your razor seeks the high spots.

When I shape a soft Ark I polish it pretty extensively, because I think soft Arks you want really finely surfaced, harder Arks you want a bit of uniform diffusion on the pitch for the best feedback.  So this is shaped to 400 grit sandpaper, and it won’t get much finer as you use it.

This stone makes for an ideal razor bevel-setter, and then you can refine that bevel with finer abrasives used at progressively longer effective diameters.