Thread: Speed honing....

Originally Posted by mainaman

A Shinden Suita, Ohira Suita, Okudo Suita, Nakayama Suita, any will do, mine allow me to go from 1k to finisher in a few minutes. After that I use tomonagura and done. The whole thing does not take more than 15 minutes.

For a good suita, a couple of minutes are enough after the 1k, but the edge won't be shave ready, or at least it can be refined even further. The drawback is... the thousand of $$ you have to pay for a decent one, with a good shape, and clear of inclusions (not the thin, almost fake red veins, the ones that do hurt the edge).

I was wondering, after setting a bevel with a tape, remove it, then progress to your finisher with two layers, wouldn't be friendlier for the razor to use one instead of two on finishing? I doubt it will take much more time for the same results.

Originally Posted by Vasilis

For a good suita, a couple of minutes are enough after the 1k, but the edge won't be shave ready, or at least it can be refined even further. The drawback is... the thousand of $$ you have to pay for a decent one, with a good shape, and clear of inclusions (not the thin, almost fake red veins, the ones that do hurt the edge).

I was wondering, after setting a bevel with a tape, remove it, then progress to your finisher with two layers, wouldn't be friendlier for the razor to use one instead of two on finishing? I doubt it will take much more time for the same results.

Yes, a suita will not produce a shave ready edge, so after I am done with mine I go to a finisher with tomonagura.
One does not have to spend a ton to get a suita that gets the job done. Full size stones with features are expensive, but smaller boring colored ones are not and they will do the job fine.

Pretty much unicot, or one stone honing. I don't use it a lot, but it makes honing quite easy and fast. It's so easy if feels like cheating.

Pithor. It IS cheating!

That said, I've been working on this nondescript, no maker determined, only mark BobH and I could really see was Bros.... It's a faux frame back grind, cheap scales and while it hadn't seen much time on the hones, some pitting got really deep near the spine so it'll never be pretty, but there is a lot of steel to hone before it gets close to that pitting, so I intended to use it for daily shaving and not for looking at. Well... the idea of using that brown turd to get things going on a 1k Naniwa Professional really worked well and I finally got the bevel set on it. I did the cheat with 2 layers of tape, and everything looked good... except I just could not get the dang thing to my level of acceptable sharpness. It shaved, but just not that easy. I took it back to my 8" Kiita 4 times, lots and lots of laps.... the edge looked good under 40x , but it just would not take a great edge. I all but shrugged it off as cheap steel, but out of the blue I thought, why not toss it on a 16K Shapton for a few laps.... just for fun. THAT woke the edge up! It's not as polished as I would like... perhaps I'll need to take it for a spin on some crox, but wow... this must be quite hard steel compared to all my other razors, and I've got a few!

So yes, this is, as I described in the original post, a cheating way to get a quick shaving edge.... it is NOT the proper way to hone a razor, but for daily, personal use, it works fine for me. It also lets you get an edge on a otherwise cantankerous razor that seems to defy anything you do to it, so you can at least prove to yourself that it WILL take an edge... you just have to work at it more.