Newbies have your razor honed TWICE

After several years of DE shaves I saw the light and decided to move to straights. I spent a few weeks reading the various posts on here to make sure I started off on the right foot. I followed the advice and bought a shave ready Wapi honed by a SRP member and a Dovo strop. The idea being I had a benchmark against which to judge future sharpness and give myself a chance of getting a decent shave.

Like all newbies the first few shaves were a mixture of nerves and excitement but I was making progress. After a few weeks I was doing well and bought a few razors off e-bay and some hones to practice my honing. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get those e-bay razors shave sharp. So I sent one of them to a honemeister and the result was outstanding.

After 5 weeks of shaving I thought my Wapi was holding its edge well. However, after comparing it to my newly honed e-bay razor, I realised what sharp really was. My Wapi did start off super sharp but 5 weeks of wear and tear, newbie abuse and perhaps some less than perfect stropping had taken its toll on the edge. It was still shaveable but not a patch on a freshly honed razor.

Yes the Wapi did set the benchmark but with everything else to try and learn, I forgot just how sharp the bench mark was. For this reason, I would strongly suggest that after a while of shaving with a razor, newbies should consider getting it honed again to remind themselves what a shave with a properly honed razor feels like and to start a second time with a perfect edge.

You shouldn't lose an edge within only 5 weeks tbh. Be sure your stropping is 100%.

Enjoy that new freshly honed razor. :tu

The sad but true fact is that no matter how long you have been shaving when your razor starts to deteriorate it usually starts in the comfort department and you can still get a really close shave however the deterioration is often times so slow and incedious it just creeps up on you and you don't realize it until you switch to a freshly honed razor and then its like wow I didn't realize what was happening here. If you wait until the closeness starts to go or you start getting razor burn its really gotten downhill by then.

When I was doing my stropping experiment a few years ago and I was using the same three razors for months straight I had to use another razor every now and then to gauge what was really happening with the three. Its amazing what you get used to.