Thread: Why Honed by hand feels better

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.