First welcome,

Second,

I'm afraid you're more than a little bit confused. I would really, really recommend getting Lynn's DVD on straight razors.

First - FORGET all you know about knife sharpening. Very little will help you and trying to transfer the methods to razors will probably ruin the razors.

The Norton 4k/8k are used to take a relatively dull blade, such as the "shave ready" razors on eBay and from many vendors (none here though), and sharpen it to where it will give an adequate to good shave. Occasionally, you'll get a real stinker but then that is almost a restoration job.

What many here do is improve that edge by polishing using either a pasted strop, a coticule, or now the Spyderco ultra-fine hone.

The four sided pasted strop will have three sides with different grades of abrasive and the fourth side for just plain stropping. Stropping would be done prior to each shave, the pasted edges would only be used occassionaly.

If you restrict your razor purchases to those that are truly shave ready you probably won't need the Norton. Every once in while you might wish to send it to one the honemeisters here for a tune up.

Once again I'll add the recommendation to get Lynn's DVD as well as looking at the various threads here to learn how to use these tools. It is not intuitively obvious.