Alright so I recently bought a wapi and it was a lot sharper than a supposedly "shave ready" I got from a forum member. Afterward I found out that this forum member had tried to compose a faq for straight shaving that had many objections from other forum members. So as you can guess, it is not that surprising that the razor was not all that sharp.

Anyways, my wapi was much sharper but still not all that fantastic. In its defence I have been told I have very thick and coarse hair both on my head and face. Anyways, I was looking to get it a bit sharper and to have something to do some maintenaince on my blades so I ordered a chinese 12k because it was cheap.

So I did about 50 passess on the chinese 12k and the blade felt a bit duller on the TPT and performeed worse on the HHT (now it will only cut a hair if the blade is pretty close to the point where it is being held. So I thought I had dulled my blade, but since everyone says that shaving is the only true test, I gave it a shot.

Holy Crap! Not only was the blade noticeably sharper (Normally there is a lot of pullling on the first pass!) but it was waaaayyy smoother than my first handful of shaves with the same razor. This really had me stumped because all the tests didn't really give me much feedback as to the condition of the blade.

Are these tests just less reliable as the blade gets sharper or is it just a lack of experience? Has anyone else had a holy **** moment like this?