As many other stones, I've got this stone purely by the recommendation of Dave Martell of Japanese Knife Sharpening. As you can guess by its grit value, 5000 to be precise, this Naniwa Chosera was meant to be an intermediate step between 2000-3000 grit stone like the 2-3K Aoto I have, and a higher grit stone like the 10000 grit Naniwa Chosera finishing superstone or the 8k-12k Kitayama. However, later, as I found out with more use it worked perfectly well as a touch up stone, when I didn't really need to fall back all the way down to 2K-3K.
General
- Naniwa Chosera 5000 grit waterstone comes packed in a cardboard box complete with Nagura. The stone is baseless, which to me is a plus, but once the stone is down to final few millimeters base might become handy :) Anyway, that is a hard stone and it'll take very long time to get down to its last layers. Nagura is quite large compared to the one that comes with Kitayama whetstone, and exactly the same that came with the 10000 grit Naniwa Chosera finishing superstone. The stone itself is really hard one, but the mud builds up quite easily, I suspect mainly form nagura. After over half a year of use, and quite intensive use I might add, I needed to flatten the stone only once. Which is why I said few times it is a hard one.Performance
- During last few months, this 5000 grit Naniwa Chosera was constant member of the sharpening stone set I was using for pretty much any sharpening work. Save for the very minor touchups when I was getting by just with 10K or 12K grit stone. Other than those single stone occasions 5K Naniwa Chosera is the irreplaceable component. Well, that's for me and my use. In other words it isn't absolutely necessary to have it, but if you do it will help you to produce a better edge. Well, simply it's more gradual step up in terms of grits. I find it especially useful with high hardness knives like all of the Aritsugu Knives, save for the A-Type gyuto, Sanetsu ZDP-189 gyuto, Watanabe knives and other knives above 62-63HRC. That's about its use. Now about performance.Well, in two words it's very good :) Like I said above, nagura builds up mud quickly and cutting speed is quite high for the stone of this grit. Resulting finish is pretty much mirror polish, if you go without applying very high pressure and your movements are even, you'll get very good results in terms of polish level. Keep in mind this is not exactly the stone to produce ideal mirror finish anyway, higher grit stones are meant for that, but whatever it can do is very impressive. I don't spend too much time on this stone, there is no need for it as usual, because if you screwed up on the lower levels you can't really fix it with 5K stone, but for the softer steels this one can really take away the metal. However, there is no need for that, for two reasons: one, you need to learn proper sharpening, two no need to wear expensive, high grit stone even on the soft steel. One more, definitely positive feature of the 5K Naniwa Chosera is its water consumption. Nearly at the level of the 10K Naniwa Chosera. Not very intrusive during sharpening, as in you don't have to stop every minute to sprinkle the water on it.
Conclusion
- I'm very positive about 5000 grit Naniwa Chosera stone, cutting speed is high, wears down real slow, water consumption is good and importantly enough, the feel of the stone is very good during sharpening. In my opinion, if your budget allows for it, you should include it in your sharpening stone set. Well, budget and if you are striving for that perfect edge. Otherwise, you can skip this and jump to 8K or above after 3-4K stone.Last updated - 05/19/19