Thread: Thumb test...

Originally Posted by icecow

What do you mean by 'particularly communicative'?

The feel of the razor on the hone distinctly changes as the razor approaches shaving sharp. The exact nature of the change is hard to describe, but the shapton gets kind of "sticky" as the razor approaches shaving sharp, and the translucent arkansas goes from a smooth sliding feel to more of a scraping feel.

Originally Posted by icecow

"If I make a pasted hanging strop, do I put paste on both the linen side, and the hyde side?" <---btw, anyone can feel free to answer that

You can do that if you want. I've got two pasted hanging strops, one of them is a two-sided leather strop with flexcut gold on one side and 11k boron carbide on the other, and the other strop is a standard hanging strop with chromium oxide on the leather side only.

I don't really use my hanging strops on my razors very much, they're mostly for my knives.

Originally Posted by mparker762

I don't really use my hanging strops on my razors very much, they're mostly for my knives.

heh, that leads to another dangerous question I've been wanting to ask. I full-on cook time to time, yet keeping my chef knives sharp is still a challenge.
Are the same hones and strops a good way to bring a chefs knife and paring knive back in to shape?

Originally Posted by icecow

heh, that leads to another dangerous question I've been wanting to ask. I full-on cook time to time, yet keeping my chef knives sharp is still a challenge.
Are the same hones and strops a good way to bring a chefs knife and paring knive back in to shape?

They will do a bang-up job of it, but I'd get a separate set of hones for the kitchen knives, just because I'd hate to cross-contaminate my razors with kitchen bugs.

I keep my kitchen knives sharp with a giant hard arkansas hone (3x8x1.5), followed by the flexcut gold strop, followed by the boron carbide strop. Once the steel stops restoring the edge I usually start back at the flexcut, they only go to the arkansas stone if they're really dull. If the blade gets nicked I've got a coarse norton combination hone (probably 100/400 but I don't really know) that quickly denickifies it before sending it on to the hard arkansas.

I also use the big hard arkansas stone on my razors, but I use the "A" side for them and use the "B" side on the knives.

My smaller pocketknives are done on the lansky, then to the strops.

Wouldn't a ceramic hone do the trick for the kitchen stuff, without the mess? You could get the Spyderco Ultrafine.