Thread: Honing motivation...

As Marshall said, I just enjoy making things sharp. For years it was knives, and then I thought, "How much sharper could I make a straight razor?" Then like the rest of you, I fell through the looking glass. I always try to keep in mind Sixgun's truism that 90% of honing is in the bevel set (which is why I just bought a Chosera 1k, which makes that way quicker and more refined IMO).

But you could do probably 90% of what you need to do on the good ole Norton 4/8k combo, which years ago was the standard here on SRP, though now you have to have the Nanis to sit at the cool kids' table. And my honing partner CJBianco loves the edges off of his Nani 8k better than almost anything he tries to improve them with. He buys and sells razors and hones all the time to play with, then gets bored with them and flips them (or trades them to me!). In fact, he's quite the expert on vintage barber hones, which is a whole other tangent to veer off on.

A lot of these old hands are far more experienced than I am, and have forgotten about more hones than I will ever own, which is fine. Personally, I just started messing around with naturals recently (PHIG, JNat and TransArk), even though I was/am getting fine edges off my trusty Norton 4/8 and Nani 12 progression. For me, like others, I just want to play around with them, experiment with slurries and all the other esoterica, and yeah, see if I can chase that "ultimate edge."

And from what I've seen in some of the threads in the "Finer Things" forum, many of us are alike in that when we get into a hobby, we go all in. As I often say (and my long-suffering friends and family can attest), I don't have hobbies, I have obsessions.

Which is why we're all here messing around on SRP instead of working, taking care of the honey-do list, or all the other boring things we could be doing. Enjoy at whatever level you get into it!