Thread: honing razors.

I disagree that you need lots of straight razor experience to know if something is "shave ready". Anyone with any shaving experience whatsoever knows whether an implement will shave their whiskers or not. Sure, they'll need to muck around with angle and the kind of stroke, but that is hardly difficult to both grasp or implement. I knew my first razor was not shave ready the first time I ever used a straight, and I am a renowned twit.

I think sometimes we get caught up in the minutia and forget it is simply about safely and effectively shaving. You can, for example, actually shave off a <10K edge, believe it or not. I shaved off an 8k edge for several years. In fact, I shaved off a factory Dovo edge every second day for about 2 weeks before finally honing it. It is all about learning as you go and progressively building up expertise and experience - none of the older hands had a forum like this, nor did they have the information contained within it, and they most certainly did not have the working definition of "shave-ready" that we seem to have nowadays, and yet they managed to learn to hone and shave.

So to the OP, it's your money, your time, your face, your learning experience. I would suggest you not buy the world's most expensive razor to learn to hone on, simply because you may have some issues, but by the same token you may not. I never killed any of my learning razors, so perhaps you won't either.

Good luck to you.

James.