Thread: wondering about teeth

Drawing a blade diagonally along a hone (to cover the whole blade) makes diagonally oriented teeth, right?

If so, then I'm wondering how much that angle needs to be preserved, in two cases:

1) on one hone

Seems like if you really wanted to ensure that the whole blade was being sharpened evenly, you'd do the standard diagonal stroke half the time, then switch, i.e. alternating between sliding in the direction of the heel and sliding in the direction of the toe. However, this doesn't seem conducive to forming teeth at all. Is it important to maintain the same angle and really groove those teeth?

2) from one hone to the next

Due to varying widths and lengths of different hones, it seems like the angles on those diagonal strokes would also be different. Indeed, I'm sure I've seen pics taken with a microscope that showed each successive set of smaller teeth oriented at different angles. Is this good, bad, or a non-issue?

The goal is for one stone to completely remove the scratch pattern left by the previous stone. So, No, it is not important to really deepen the grooves. And, by the same reasoning, it's not neccessary to maintain a fixed amount of skew from one stone to the next. I personally don't change it up much, though, because I hold the razor at a comfortable angle, and that angle happens to be the same no matter what hone I use.

If someone were to come to me with two excellently sharpened razors and one had a perfectly smooth bevel under magnification and the other had a scratch pattern, I'd pick the perfectly smooth one.