Thread: Thoughts on "Less is more." in honing

Originally Posted by JimR

This is a great post, Jimmy, thanks.

I myself have been looking at the scratch patterns, and have been trying to eliminate them as best I could, and I think I have a defensible reason why: it is a clear, visible and objective way to measure honing for a newbie honer like myself.

I understand that it isn't necessary and that as honers improve then the TNT, TPT and, finally, the shave test give a better indication of shave readiness. But until I get to the point where my judgment from the TPT starts to reach point where I am confident in moving to the shave test, scratch pattern elimination is giving me some pretty darned good edges.

I fully expect that as I get better and more experienced (to flirt with redundancy), then scratch patterns will become less important to my honing--I look forward to that day. However, learning to hone is a process and in many ways it can't be taught by anything but experience. At the moment, I'm not confident enough in my TPT, or even my understanding of the shave test, to rule out scratch pattern elimination.

It'll come, I'm sure.

My post on less is more only relates my experience of learning on this forum from the many different voices that were suggesting what seemed like conflicting information to my ear and how I came to understand the minimalist point of view. I first came to straight razor shaving in the mid 1980s. I had already started collecting vintage pieces at flea markets and antique stores. I became close friends with a pro barber who was also a collector although he didn't use them outside of his vocation.

A fellow that worked for him was in his seventies cutting hair for half a century and I got a Swaty, a coticule and a primer lesson in honing from him. Weight of the blade and only a few strokes was the mantra. Well this was all well and good if it worked but it didn't.... at least not for me. I stuck with the straight shaving for a relatively short time. Probably until my shaving razors got too dull to use, I really don't recall.

I never was able to get them sharp or keep them sharp because of my lack of imagination at the time. If I had ignored the "less is more" philosophy given by the old barber and used a bit more than the weight of the blade, more strokes than the prescribed 4 or 5...... who knows maybe it would have worked for me. What happened was that I gave it up and 25 years later ended up at SRP and was confronted with a few different schools of thought on honing razors. I was fortunate in having a former forum member and honemiester living within thirty miles of me.

He invited me to his house and I went there a few times for what turned out to be lessons in bevel setting, sharpening and finishing his way. This was a hybrid of the methods talked about on SRP and it worked for me. It wasn't the less is more though and that was fine with me. So I learned to hone and I was successful in getting the edges shave ready. My natural tendency to collecting went to razor acquisition and a steady stream of blades came in for me to practice on.

As time went on and I also began buying various hones and trying different methods of using them that I had read about on the forum I began to understand what Lynn and that old barber were saying in practice rather than in theory. One of the biggest helps to me in getting that understanding was buying razors that Lynn, Don, Tim Zowada and other honemiesters had honed and examining them under magnification. There was a scratch pattern and some were 'smoother' than others but all of them had a scratch pattern under magnification.

Some had those deeper scratches randomly interspersed within the pattern but they all shaved me very well. My point in mentioning this is not to attack the concept of honing until your scratch pattern is as smooth as possible. That is fine if it is what you want to do. I had two problems. The first was the no pressure/few strokes was inexplicable to me and the second was Lynn posting that on most days he honed between twenty and thirty razors. Most of the razors I had bought came from ebay and had to have the bevel reset and would take from forty five minutes to an hour using the hybrid method that I had learned. Some took considerably longer. So Lynn knew something that I didn't know and I wanted to find out what that was.

Through studying the methods that Lynn wrote about and through a few times speaking to him directly I began relying on the TPT and stopped worrying about scratch patterns and focused on sharpening and the shave test. I came to the point where I realized that once the bevel was set relatively few strokes could achieve the goal of a shave ready razor. That was how Lynn could hone twenty or thirty razors a day, especially since they were mostly new blades for the vendors that he serviced.

So I have nothing against polishing bevels if that is your shtick. I'm not prescribing the less is more method to the exclusion of more intensive honing. Rather my purpose is to relate how I came to understand it and utilize it when I choose to. The 'more is better' school of thought is valid if it works and it does for those who want to go that way. Different strokes and all of that.