Another newbie straight razorist here and I just went ahead and bought the strop plus hone combo, the arkansas and two wapienicas as my starter kit.
After reading about other people's experiences with this, I mean to cut my teeth on this by honing it myself and trying it.
Any recommendations as for how many laps it might take on each to get it properly sharpened from those who have alread tried it?
Don't worry about how many strokes of the hone are required to sharpen these razors as you'll get too hung up on thoughts like it should be sharp now or it feels sharp and I've only done half as many as they said. This might mean you end up over honing or not honing enough.
The figure will be different for every person and razor because no two people will use the same pressure, length of stroke or movement.
Just go for it (maybe after taping the spine and lapping the hone to make sure it's flat) and use the tests recommended here every now and then until you're happy. Don't worry about the HHT straight off the hone as you probably won't achieve this until you move to the strop.
I can't comment on the hones, as yet.
But I would suggest reading up on the thumb pad test; honing/stropping should be test driven, not numbers of strokes. You want to draw the pad of your thumb across (not along!) the blade at several points. There should be a slight dragging feel from this at each point you try.
Once you reach that point, and you should start testing before any honing at all, strop on plain leather (dressing is ok, but don't add any grinding paste). Your initial strops may make the edge worse until you get the technique right, but you can strop or hone some more.
It initially took me about 30 laps on the arkansas with medium light pressure to get a fairly good edge followed by loads on the slate type hone with very little pressure at all. I think it was either 60 or 100 I can not remember now and then did about 20 on the soft side of the leather strop.
I got a really sharp blade to pass the HHT, popped hairs off my arm (Run it up the arm with the spine on the arm and without te blade touching the skin to see if hairs are cut, not shaved) and got a really close but gentle shave.
Ok here is where I got cocky and thought, I can make it a bit sharper and think I went too far and overhoned it (strange feeling but was really sharp) and then dropped it an damaged the blade.
I think it would be worth
1 - Making sure the hone is lapped
2 - getting 1 of your 2 sharpened by a honemeister to get a bench mark
3 - looking on you tube and searching for straight razor honing (watch 1, 2 and 3 but not the joke)
4 - wait to get your honed razor back and mirror it's sharpness through honing but use very little pressure.
All of this is IMHO but I am a newbie too and am still very inexperienced, just trying to pass on what I learned but this is significantly less than the experts in the wonderfully helpful place
Obviously, I know very little but I thought the Arkansas had a higher grit (6-8K) than the slate at 4k? Shouldn't I be starting the work on the slate and then moving to the arkansas before finishing on the strop?
The arkansas stones that wojtec offers are nice; however, they seem to be the soft translucent stones not the hard black stones. It is my understanding that the harder black Arkansas are a higher grit than the soft translucent ones and I would be surprised if the Arkansas stones that Wojtec offers are higher than 6K.