Hello Everyone,

I'm new to Straight Razor shaving, and so far I am loving it.

I picked up one of the Dorvo kits from SRD. The first shave went pretty well (better than expected), and each shave since has become slightly easier. However, I've noticed that the blade seems to be becoming slightly more and more dull with each successive shave. Even from day one it never passed the HHT test, though after reading up on that it seems that is not necessarily a major issue so I didn't worry about it too much. But as I continue to shave I notice in the trickier areas the razor seems to get "hung up" more.

As I understand it, the razor should not really be dulling this quickly. I've had the razor for a couple months now but really only have a couple weeks worth of shaves on it as I do not use it daily. I strop the blade about 20x both before and after I use it, so approximately 40 strops in between shaves, which seems to be about the recommended amount. Am I not stropping it enough, or am I screwing up the blade while stropping?

Stropping consists of moving the blade in an X pattern, spine first, across the strop. Rotating at each end on the spine, not the point. That being said, the various nicks on my strop would indicate I certainly need to work on my stropping more.

So... regardless of the cause, what do I need to do in order to "repair" my blade or am I better off leaving it alone for now, as it is still capable of shaving? Should I be looking at picking up a honing stone at this point, and if so which grit should I be looking at? I see people talking about honing stones from 4k, 8k, 12k, 16k, and natural japanese stones which I have no idea of the grit on. I'm assuming the angle on the edge is fine and that I just need to refinish the blade. The highest grit I seem to be able to actually find is the 8k, but that sounds like it's more of a rough finish for a razor.