Just wanted to introduce myself and say hi. I have been a DE shaver since 2008 and have really enjoyed the process from Razors, soaps, creams, and blades. I will probably be taking the next step in the next few months and I plan on just going with Whipped Dog on a kit unseen to start with. My biggest concern is not the shave, but the honing and stropping. I learned to sharpen knives from my dad and granddad and have their Arkansas Soft Stone and the Hard sharpening stones which I will not use for a Straight Razor. I do know that sharpening a razor is much different than knives. I have seen many talk about the Norton 4000/8000 combination water stone, and many others. You can get over whelmed and spend a great deal quickly. I just want to keep it simple for now and my thoughts are that Straight Razor shaving has been on this earth for a long time my granddad and even his granddad used Straight Razors and I suspect back in the early 1800's to the early 1900's my kin folks were pretty poor and probably used one sharpening stone and a leather strop. I know they were pretty good at razor sharpening as they were all clean shaven men in all the pictures that I and my parents have ever seen. Just a quick note that in 1983 after my grandparents death we proceeded to clean out the house gathered the things we wanted and just did an estate sale for everything else. I do remember cleaning out the bathroom drawer and my granddad had 7 or 8 straight razors and several vintage Gillettes razors. Then we started cleaning out the storage building. Found a big box of Straight Razors that he sold at their country store he owned in Mississippi. Most were Filarmonica and Henkels. I think we sold both boxes for $20 and there were probably 15 Filarmonica still in original box never used and 6 Henkels in the original box never used. Just did not know about all this stuff back then.