Moss Flower Coarse Grit 8x3x1” M0050

The coarse grit Moss Flower is a new type of sharpening stone in our Nusantara series from the mine in Indonesia! This strata comes from below the ivory layers. An excellent choice of natural sharpening stone good for grinding and initial shaping and bevel setting.
Here are the s specifications On a scale of 1 - 5 
Hardness level 4.5 
Girt level 3.5 - 4
Cutting speed 3
I’d recommend this stone to beginners who are looking for a super durable common use whetstone for daily tasks like knife sharpening and maintaining edged tools. 
Expert and more experienced  sharpeners will also enjoy using this stone in natural grit progressions as a transition stone after creating extra coarse scratch patterns. 
This is not a finishing level of stone if you are sharpening straight razors, but it’s at the upper levels of coarseness - which lends it to be a solid choice for bevel setting and maintaining kitchen or hunting knives.
The stone has good hardness - I give it a 4.5 out of 5. It is not muddy on its own, but gives generous amounts slurry very easily with a diamond plate or rubbing stone. With firm pressure you’ll notice faster metal removal. 
Sharpening on these yields a hard but aggressive feeling with audible feedback. While it’s not an extremely aggressive grit level, you’ll notice a medium level of speed, hence why I put the grit rating at 3.5 out of 5 and the hardness at. 3/5.
This is an excellent clean up stone after doing extremely coarse grinding with a 120 or 325 grit diamond plate and perfectly aggressive for knives that you want a microscopically serrated edge on. 
For dulled edges this strata can bring back the bite to your blade with relative ease, it cuts very consistently and steady. For serious repair work this makes a great follow up stone after extra coarse grinding. 
The moss flower has a sandy feel to the surface that will slowly burnish due to its high silicate content. For minor edge repairs it will get the job done.
This slight grit variability is an advantage - if you dress it with a mellow 600 grit diamond plate or a rubbing stone it performs finer, or sand the surface on occasion with lower grit for faster sharpening performance.
When the surface is dressed with a 120 or 220 grit abrasive it grinds steel with a much more raspy audible feed back. If you dress it finely then it has a much smoother feel. This is a benefit you cannot get from synthetic stones and it will also wear out dramatically slower than ceramic stones, which need constant flattening.
Unless you are a knife professional sharpening hundreds of knives a month it will easily last multiple lifetimes. Even under serious heavy use it will last 10x longer than man made stones of similar grit levels which shed particles faster due to having very soft binding elements, I would be shocked if anyone could wear through this entire stone in one lifetime.
I suggest you play with the surfacing of the stone to get the feel for it. You’ll find that it can perform similar to a 600 grit synthetic stone, being just fine enough to finish off kitchen knife edges with a great level of sharpness. When you smooth the surface and use lighter pressure it can yield a grit feeling similar to the 1000 - 2000 grit range in synthetic stones, which is a perfect grit level for your daily use knives that you work with in the kitchen or during outdoors tasks.
These are ideal for tools and rough sharpening when you want a toothy sharp working edge.
The moss flower sharpens and grinds at between the 600 to 2000 grit level - this is an approximation because it is difficult to put a specific grit rating on a natural stone and advantageously the grit feeling can be changed based on how you dress the stone.