I hate tomatoes...

Well, actually I love them and digest them in some form almost daily, but I also hate them, 'cause they embarrass my high-end Wusthoff kitchen cutlery. Unless I freshly hone and steel those knifes, any mutt of a serrated knife will easily outperform my fine Wusthoffs. I store them in a wooden block, they always get rinsed and wiped by hand and are pampered like babies. At the same time, that serrated piece of junk practically lives in the dishwasher and corrodes to sharpness. Still, it cuts tomatoes very well on any day, while the Wusthoffs only really measure up when I bring them up to peak performance, a condition they loose rather rapidly.
Don't get me wrong: I love my Wusthoffs, couldn't live without them, and they cut food really well, even tomatoes. It's just that I like justice. Serrated crap sold by schmuck TV salesmen, equaling my precious babies, well that just ain't justice. And that's why I hate tomatoes.

For the same reason, I also hate hanging hairs. I can hone a razor on my DMT 1200 to a state where it perfoms the HHT extremely well. At that point, start honing it on a coticule with slurry, and notice how, with each stroke, the HHT-readiness of that razor is wiped away. I assumed that the principles of the serrated knife applied to this situation, very analog to the tomato observations I made above. If you remove the serrations from an edge, it takes honing to considerable keenness before that edge measures up again to the raw severing power of its serrated state.
Somehow I managed to co-exist peacefully with that knowledge. Nevertheless I often wondered if some compromise needs to be reached between striations (the razors equivalent of serrations) and a slick egde. The goal would be to find the Ueber razor edge, that combines durabilty, closeness and smoothness in the ideal mixture for my face.
Then AFDavis contibuted a link to a Popular Science Article defeating the above assumptions (or not?) I hate AFDavis.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, if the premise of the striations is false, than there's only one other possiblity left. A coticule with slurry must be doing something with the edge of the razor. I have my own theory about what exactly is going on, posted at Josh Earls "Coticule Chronicles", but since no one has showed any interest in that, I'm not going to reiterate.

After some further contemplation, I think the best way to be over with the "striations help the HHT" theory once and for all, is to perform a hone progression from low grit to high grit on a series of hones from one single family and find out if the HHT test does nothing but gradually improve when moving up the grit ladder. Or does the HHT passes just fine at grit 1200, worsens from there on to peak again at a much higher grit? I would really like to know. I can't think of a better hone family to perform this experiment on than the Shaptons. Unfortunately, I don't have access to any Shaptons, so I was wondering if any of the Shaptoneers on this forum are willing to perform such a test, or perhaps already know the outcome, and would be willing to share the results? I would be most grateful.

Thanks,

Bart.