Thread: New Guy

Don’t forget that there were a lot of very fine natural honing stones available for a long time before synthetics became available: coticules, BBW, Jnats, Thuringians, Eschers, …. They might not have been well known until more recently on this side of the ponds, but internationally, there was a lot of very sharp steel (knives, swords, surgical tools and razors) being made for quite a bit of history.

#DZEC Point taken for the industrial and medical side it's just that I found it hard to believe that the average man would be aware of these stones let alone have the time or money to invest in finding out.
But yes I can see how businesses thriving to be better than their competitors would look and find other stones and procedures that gave them the "EDGE!".....(See what I did there!?! ) over the competition.

The average guy would have likely had a small fine hone, a pasted strop, a linen and leather strop. When they bought their razor it was actually shave ready and they would maintain that edge. If they dinked the edge or failed in their maintenance they would have taken it to some one to reset the bevel. When the hone wear got bad they would have gotten it reground. Disposable was not a word anyone used back then.

Our average ancestors were way more aware of how to make and keep things sharp than the average person today. Their lifes depended on it. They may not have had the internet to research some unigue quarry somewhere else in the world but they knew how to do it with what they had availiable to them.

I have this vision of a man cutting the fields with a sythe for 12 or more hours a day not thinking about how he could make the edge sharper and make his job easier by 2%.