Thread: Why is the 1st shave after honing so disagreeable?

Hey Kevin, I didn't think you were busting my chops, I'm just trying to anticipate questions before they arise to keep thee thread down to a reasonable length. In text you lose cues like facial expression, tone of voice, etc, so it's easy to misunderstand people's intentions.

Old barber hones are indeed not considered all that great in this day and age. I am told that a Norton stone or a Coticule is less prone to raising a wire edge. I've never used either, so I don't know.

As far as unconventional...I'm told barber hone -> linen -> leather is about as conventional as it gets. The way I treated the strop is even right out of a 1960s barbering textbook: rub with a candle, smooth with a glass bottle. The cloth has a very bumpy texture, so most of the wax is filling the voids between the bumps. The heads of the bumps are still peeking through, because I mashed everything down with the glass bottle. It's possible that the remnants of ferric oxide are what's really responsible for removing the wire edge. I don't know. There must be some reason why the previous owner put it on there.

I'm going to keep at it for a while & see if the linen allows me to do touch-ups on the Lithide hone without getting a wire edge. If so, I'll ditch the Cr02 & plant the victory flag. That's all I was hoping to achieve here: to find a method of touching-up that doesn't round my bevel off. If I encounter some other problem that all of this causes, I'll report on it in this thread.

It's entirely possible that a Norton would eliminate the need to burnish the wire edge off, by simply not raising a wire edge. What can I say. I'm hell bent & determined to do this the way my grandfather did it. Consider it the final triumph of stubbornness over common sense.

Side note: I can't help wondering if linen strops fell out of use because modern stones don't raise a wire edge like that. Maybe Randy knows.

I don't understand any of this either, but if it solves my problem, understanding can come later. For now I want to see how the edge behaves over the long haul when I touch it up using hone/linen/leather instead of Cr02/leather.