Thread: Patience and burn.

For the honing, I had to reset the bevel on a razor out of the box before actually working on the edge. So it went like this: DMT Coarse, Fine, Extra Fine, Extra Extra Fine, then stropped on Hand American leather with 1 Micron buffing compound, then stropped on .5 micron buffing compound, and ended with plain leather. But the strops were homemade strops on hard backings, not razor strops in the traditional sense. I'm assuming that this set of materials is good enough, I'm just not spending enough time with proper technique on the EEF stones on up.

If the razor isn't dead sharp, you'll be using pressure to hold it against your face when shaving -- without pressure, it won't cut hair. That pressure is a prime cause of razor burn -- the edge goes through the protective layer of lather, and scrapes skin.

To test:

. . . Try shaving with just enough pressure to squeegee the lather off your face.

If the razor cuts beard off when you do that, it's probably sharp enough. If it doesn't -- lather comes off, beard is left behind -- it's probably dull.

Razors are really delicate creatures compared to knives. The bevel angle is much less, and the edge has to be treated very gently during honing.

I don't know the grit sizes of the DMT stones. But the usual advice here is to run the sequence down to an 8K grit (or finer), and polish the edge with _no pressure_ (or very light pressure) on that stone. Then go to CrOxide and other pastes, and hone.

I suspect -- since the DMT's have a reputation for being very aggressive -- that you're using too much pressure on the DMT XXF, and leaving deep gouges in the edge. And they're not being removed by the following stropping steps.

Charles

PS -- since I don't own any diamond hones, take all this with a grain of salt.