Thread: Why Honed by hand feels better

I don't have the intellect to follow this type of stuff. I read these hyper technical evaluations of what makes a superlative bevel with interest but I guess I'm not technically minded and I'm certainly not well educated in science, math, physics.

It reminds me of when I began to go to AA meetings twenty five years ago and had a problem with the "higher power" concept. IIRC Bill Wilson, one of the AA co-founders, said that you don't have to understand electricity to have light. You flip the switch and shazzam you have light.

I have the same approach to sharpening razors. I read Lynn's treatise on pyramids and followed it. Then further down the road the circles. Worked wonders for me. I have discussed honing at length with Lynn on the telephone. We talk practice not theory and I have found it very helpful.

The theory is cool but I don't pay a lot of attention to it. I prefer the hands on application that eventually comes out of it. When y'all's experiments and studies give rise to yet another honing method I will read about that and apply it. In the meantime rock on with the techy theory stuff. I guess that is why we have the wheel and the technology that followed from techy guys like both of you.

It's interesting because it's state-of-the-art, or at least more state-of-the-art than what we're doing. They've put a lot of R&D money into what they're doing, and we can get hints of better techniques by seeing what they're doing and deciphering if they're doing it for a better product or for lower costs. The switch to stainless was done for quality purposes, for example (stainless is more expensive and harder to work, hence the '69 patent, but Wilkinson's new stainless blades were eating their lunch). The use of teflon may have improved the quality of the blades (I've never tried a vintage uncoated blade) but it may have also enabled a reduction in their manufacturing costs elsewhere. The helical hone machine OTOH definitely has elements of both, going by their patent claims.

For example, it's quite possible that the smoothly convex bevel really is superior to the faceted convex bevel for reasons that apply to our straight razors. But to determine this we would need to do some experiments.

Also for example, the bit about their (stainless) alloy needing a high final angle - that's potentially very useful, because stainless straight razors are (a) not generally highly though of around here and (b) tend to have comparable honing angles as HCS blades - what if the reason stainless straights aren't amazingly awesome is because the honing angle is all wrong for stainless? I've got one HCS wedge with a 24.5 degree honing angle that shaves pretty comparably to wedges with normal angles, but now I think I need to get a stainless one made with that kind of angle to see if it's different or even better. I'd love to know what Gillette's alloy is, but not enough to pay the lab costs. Any ME grad students on the forum that would like to help?

Another interesting bit from the '88 patent:

...abrading station 18 includes the finish honing abrading means of U.S. Pat No 3,461,616 [aka the '69 patent] ... [misc stuff about how that station is configured elided] ... includes a resin bonded, hard, metallic oxide abrasive having an average particle size about 7 to about 9 microns.

That's for their finishing hone. They also describe the test runs of the '88 machinery

... a blade strip was fed through the stations at a speed of about 160 feet per minute. Wheels 20 and 22 were rotated in opposite directions at speeds of about 4500 rpm and wheels 120 and 122 were rotated in opposite directions at speeds of about 3600 rpm ... Representative average production rates were about 76,800 blades per hour... the average continuous time of operation for a series of test runs was about 8 hours but some test runs were run continuously without interruption for 8 hours or more without effect on the high quality of the blades...average production rates of double edge razors in online test production runs were about 36,000 blades per hour.

yowza!

This is clearly why I would never be a contentious debater of any level. As a craftsman who has been around blades his whole life, I can tell you what type of edge will ride on top of the surface and what would dig in. It is intuition and stuff you learn after many years of practice, and that is what I and many SRP members that work with their hands are blessed with. If we get in trouble and need someone to advocate for what we can not, men like MParker will hopefully be on our side and not the other way around. Phew!!!! So much of the main point in my mind remains common sense and in all probability fits into the larger category of nothing new under the sun!

Originally Posted by mparker762

Any ME grad students on the forum that would like to help?

I really do think this has been done before and if we were allowed access, it would be easy find out,or maybe we can deduce some value out of the forementioned and find practical application so we can advance.For me ths whole issue was one I felt inclined to share because it blew away my paradigm about getting bevels as flat as possible. Keep in mind, that very thought is what seperates skill levels of honers in some circles. When I deliberatly "cheated" in making my bevel flatter with the edge the same way, the shave changed for the worse. We all come here giving up freely what we discover or rediscover hopefully helps other members. Sometimes it might at very least, be amusing .

One of the things I find fascinating about what the big guys are doing is that all that whiz-bangery seems to be mostly there for cost and production volume, yet they turn out some functionally amazing edges. For all the griping about how harsh the commercial edges are, for the Fusion and Feather to have as little pull as they do (remember to divide the Fusion's pull by 5 to compare to a DE, straight or Feather AC) and to last as long as they do with no stropping is nothing short of remarkable. And to find out that they're doing it with a 7-9 micron abrasive wheel spinning at 3600+ rpm as the blades are flying by at 160ft/min is incredible. Yes the teflon is helping a lot, but we've all seen what their edges look like under high-power microscopes, and they don't look bad at all.

I'm sure their alloy has been refined considerably over the years, they are one of the few companies that has a serious interest in optimizing stainless steel performance for shaving, the standard commercial stainless steels are more optimized for knives. So i'd really like to know what they're using in their alloy nowadays, after 40+ yrs of $$$$ R&D on the problem. There's a lab here in town that did the testing on my Chronik that I could probably get to do an alloy analysis on a razor blade, but that's enough of a procedure (to get good numbers) that they'd want money. Hence the request for a ME graduate student who would have free access to that sort of equipment.

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

I don't have the intellect to follow this type of stuff. I read these hyper technical evaluations of what makes a superlative bevel with interest but I guess I'm not technically minded and I'm certainly not well educated in science, math, physics.

It reminds me of when I began to go to AA meetings twenty five years ago and had a problem with the "higher power" concept. IIRC Bill Wilson, one of the AA co-founders, said that you don't have to understand electricity to have light. You flip the switch and shazzam you have light.

I have the same approach to sharpening razors. I read Lynn's treatise on pyramids and followed it. Then further down the road the circles. Worked wonders for me. I have discussed honing at length with Lynn on the telephone. We talk practice not theory and I have found it very helpful.

The theory is cool but I don't pay a lot of attention to it. I prefer the hands on application that eventually comes out of it. When y'all's experiments and studies give rise to yet another honing method I will read about that and apply it. In the meantime rock on with the techy theory stuff. I guess that is why we have the wheel and the technology that followed from techy guys like both of you.

I wish I could be in that category Jimmy, but in spite of the education and sloshing chemicals around for a living, I fit in the category of a craftsman. What is truely more amazing to me, is someone as talentd as you are who never flaunts it......

Kingfish,
Interesting thread. Thanks for taking the time to start it. Now if I can just figure this all out.