Quote Originally Posted by Bart View Post
Here's a recent observation. 2 weeks ago, I had to hone a brand new TI Silverwing for one of the members here. I honed it up with a pretty standard procedure without any use of tape.
When finished, the edge looked impeccable under the stereo microscope but after the test shave, which was great, reexamination under magnification revealed some microscopical chips randomly missing from the very edge, obviously caused by the collision with my hard whiskers. Possibly, the Silverwings, being so high up the Rockwell scale, have a tendency for being brittle.

Anyway, I went back to redo the final honing stages, with a layer of tape added to the spine. The next test shave felt just as smooth as the first, but what struck me the most was that the chipping tendency was completely gone. I expected some improvement, but not that I'd find zero discernible edge deterioration this time.

Of course this is just one individual observation, but it shows me that taping can affect edge durability before any other changes in the shaving comfort are showing up at my personal test shave radar.

I informed the owner that he needs to reapply the tape whenever he wants to touch-up the razor and included the tape so he has no issues with variable tape thickness.

Bart.
That makes sense because tape increases the angle, and a more obtuse angle = stronger edge in terms of cross section.