First time honing.

I wasn't sure if this belonged in the honing forum, but as it was my first time using a hone I thought I'd put it here as I don't think what I did even qualifies as " basic honing ".

After receiving my BBW/Coticule combination stone from Rob at Ardennes Coticule earlier this week, I lapped it this morning following the instructions in the Wiki. It wasn't too bad and I was done in a bit less than an hour. I probably could have done it a bit quicker, but I kept lifting the stone up to have a look at the underside every ten seconds or so.

Once lapped, I got out my 99p razors that I got from eBay and built some slurry on the yellow coticule side of the stone. I must say it was a real buzz to see all the things described in the wiki actually happening in front of me and I really got into a groove moving the razor across the stone. One of the razors failed every sharpness test I did on it, it made no real contact with my thumbnail and wouldn't cut hairs on my arm, but the other two responded well to the coticule with slurry so I moved on with just those two and will return to the reluctant razor another day. I built a slurry on the blue side and did about 100 laps for each razor, testing each razor with my thumb afterwards and gradually watering down the slurry for the last 20 laps. Both seemed to be very sharp so I moved back to the yellow coticule side, this time with just water and gave them both 100 laps or so.

At this point I wasn't sure if I was supposed to do some laps on a pasted strop, I do have a paddle strop pasted with CrOx, but in the end I just gave the razors 50 laps on canvas and 50 on leather. After a quick shower, I tried shaving with them and the results were very pleasing. The razors cut cleanly, smoothly and without any irritation. I also managed to avoid cutting myself even once, so all in all it was one of my better shaving experiences.

I'd just like to say thank you to Lynn for his honing videos, to everyone who contributed to the wiki, including BeBerlin and those who help make the wiki so easy to navigate and also thanks to Olivia and gregs656 who pointed me in the direction of Rob at Ardennes Coticule.

I feel very confident that I can now improve and expand my honing ability as the months go by!

Great to hear of your success. Do the marker test on the recalcitrant razor and see if it is making contact all along the edge or if you need to alter your stroke to a rolling x or whatever. Another possibility would be trying a bevel setter with a bit more tooth than a coticule. A 1k waterstone is generally what you might want.

Keep up the good work and Have fun!!

Thanks,

Lynn

I stopped using my Yellow with slurry. I get better edges just using water & polishing with it.
Plenty of useful information gathered here, & my experiences with the blue, have led me to decide that Blue with slurry followed by the Yellow gets great results out of this combination.
Once i'm happy with the edge from the BBW, the slurry is diluted every 10 laps or so, 'till it's just water. Then i use the Coticule with water.
I had a breakthrough moment when i realised that when the experts say no pressure, they really meant it!

I have had a look at the Naniwa 1k stone at Invisible Edge, Jimmy, but I think I'll wait till I have a few more razors that need the bevel setting. I will try the marker test to see what that shows though.

I'll try going straight to the BBW with slurry next time, Ben. if it's not working, if the edge was too blunt to begin with, then I can always flip the stone over and build a slurry on the yellow coticule at any point anyway. I might give a couple of my razors a touch up with the coticule and water tomorrow just in case my sloppy stropping has dulled the edges at all. I hesitated to do that initially as I wasn't confident I wouldn't screw up, but after today I feel I can manage that task ok.