Little Turtle Scrub Brush

Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.
– Plato

In this article your humble servant would like to introduce a Japanese version of a most mundane tool, one especially useful to the woodworker: the Little Turtle scrub brush.

Your slovenly servant is not a neat freak, nor do I have a cleaning fetish, much as my long-suffering mother tried to stop me eating leftover dog food off the floor as a toddler. But there is one area of human endeavor where maintaining cleanliness in an otherwise dirty world is important to me, namely sharpening woodworking tools.

This is the story of a lowly brush, not a tool we typically sell at C&S Tools, but one we often provide as a service to Beloved Customers who purchase sharpening products from us. I don’t believe it can be purchased outside Japan, but the purpose of this article is to help Beloved Customer better understand an indispensible accoutrement for sharpening your woodworking tools. So with your kind indulgence I’ll try to present this subject in a sanitary manner.

Why a Scrub Brush?

As described in our previously published series about sharpening, a basic, effective set of stones for sharpening chisels and plane blades should include a rough stone or diamond stone of 400~800 grit, a medium stone 1000~2000 grit, and a finish stone 6,000~8,000 grit. The list can be found at this link.

A nagura stone is also extremely useful IMO for cleaning and flattening sharpening stones and reducing the time required to get them operating effectively.

As mentioned above, these stones are almost always used in series, with the nagura dressing them all.

A couple of extremely common problems we face when sharpening is dust and other hard particles, many of which are airborne, contaminating our precious stones and reducing their effective grit. For instance, an 8,000 grit stone contaminated with a bit of silica-based dust will be unable to produce scratches finer than, let’s say, a 1,000 grit stone, resulting in poor results, wasted time, money and steel, and dashed expectations. I’ve written on this subject elsewhere. Link

There are few tools mankind uses that are routinely made as sharp or sharpened as often as high-quality woodworking tools, a process that, when done efficiently requires 2-4 sharpening stones to accomplish, usually used in series. And high-quality sharpening stones, be they synthetic or natural, are pricey, so the wise woodworker who needs excellent results will seek maximum performance at minimum cost and time expenditure.

How do we prevent nature from effectively turning our expensive stones to bricks? Four ways.

1. First, when not in use keep stones covered to reduce the dirt and dust that falls on them. Wrapping them in a clean rags or clean, ordinary newspaper works fine. I like newspaper best.
2. Second, before using a stone and/or nagura, scrub its faces, sides and ends with a clean bristle brush and rinse to remove contaminating grit.
3. Third, before using your fine-grit stones, especially if there is any doubt about their being free of embedded contaminants, work their faces with a nagura stone to dig out contaminants, then rinse off the mud produced along with any contaminants thus exorcised with clean water.
4. Fourth, before sharpening, use a brush and clean water to remove dust and grit from the tools that will spend time frolicking on the stones.
5. And finally, during sharpening use a dedicated source of absolutely clean, chlorine-free water to wash tools and stones and to re-wet them. What’s wrong with tap water? Depends. I use distilled water to eliminate chlorine with a bit of borax powder added to adjust the PH to reduce the potential for corrosion. In my workshop I store this water in a plastic laboratory wash bottle with a bent tube. In the field I carry a smaller volume in a plastic mustard or ketchup bottle. Whatever floats your boat, as the saying goes.

So exactly why do I say you need a scrub brush in your sharpening kit? Because if they do their job, the bristles of a quality brush are more effective at digging dirt and contaminating grit out of sharpening stones and the nooks and crannies of plane blades and chisels than any other tool including water faucets, hoses, chemical sprays, micro-fiber cloths or even kitten tongues (シ). Or did you imagine a simple wash in water or a wipe with a wet rag had stripped away all those nasty particles away just because you didn’t notice them anymore? Please restrict your optimism to reasonable limits.

The Scrub Brush

But isn’t one scrub brush much the same as any other? Nay, Beloved Customer, nay.

In the case of sharpening stones, we need to thoroughly clean our stones and tools without transferring contaminating dirt and grit from one stone to the next. I have found that the hard grit of sharpening stones becomes permanently embedded in the plastic and nylon bristles of every such brush I have examined, and even if I thought I had cleaned the brush thoroughly, hard grit particles remained and were transferred to the next stone by the brush.

How to avoid this? The solution is simply to avoid scrub brushes with nylon or plastic bristles. In my experience natural bristle brushes, and especially the Kamenoko (Little Turtle) brand brushes, simply last much longer than plastic and nylon bristle brushes, are more easily cleaned of sharpening stone grit, and tend to transfer less of it from one sharpening stone to another. These three points are the crux of this article.

Japanese tawashi brushes are made from the fibers of coconut husks. As Beloved Customer is no doubt aware, in his eternal wisdom the design team the Good Lord assigned to coconut palms provided them fibrous husks to protect and float their seeds long distances over wide, soggy oceans for years at a time. To accomplish this Homeric feat, the fibers of these husks are caused to grow tough but resilient and resistant to degradation from long-term exposure to water, microbes and even detergents.

It’s a traditional product that’s been around a long time in Japan with one company producing them for over 100 years. Here’s a video of tawashi brushes being made in Japan, and another video of production in Sri Lanka.

These brushes are also good for cleaning dirty, greasy hands, scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning car tires and wheels, and getting mud off boots with very little scratching.

If they have one downside, it’s that, being made of natural and recyclable fibers, and despite not becoming mushy when wetted for long periods of time and drying quicker than plastic brushes, they still take a bit of time time to dry and can develop mold if neglected. There’s a stainless steel wire binding the fibers together with a loop on one end that can used with a string to hang them for drying. Problem solved.

I’ve been using one Kamenoko Tawashi brush for cleaning tools and sharpening stones for over 20 years. I don’t say they’ll last that many years in the kitchen or garage, but they still last 5 times longer than plastic or nylon brushes and are therefore much more cost effective.

Most importantly, they help me keep my stones cleaner and ensure they sharpen to spec.

YMHOS

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