Thread: Premature dullness: strop technique suspected. Angle? Pressure? Fix?

Thanks for all this feedback.

Well, I'm not yet possessed of hones nor honing skills, and the grits came with the Whipped Dog SR starter kit: the strop, neet foot oil, chrome oxide, iron oxide, balsa wood grit strop. The instructions did suggest that the grits shouldn't be necessary until after a few months -- I am aware that the dullness seems due to my own newbie technique errors. Nonetheless, I was extremely careful with the grits not to use any pressure.

Suspending the strop seems to have solved many problems. The problem was not the strop, it was the fact that I hadn't suspended it, and the horizontal surface was causing me to compensate with too much pressure, which was also the source of perceived sluggish strop draw. While I may have used more oil than necessary, it doesn't seem so much as to have saturated the leather. All stropping issues seem solved by suspending the strop.

Post grits, the edge feels and performs like it did when it first got honed, at least for today's shave. Thanks for the HHT reminder -- I'd forgotten, and that would have been wiser after five or ten passes at a time. Let's see if this edge endures. I presume wire edges quickly disintegrate into ragged nightmares...? How can you tell if you've got a wire edge without a microscope? What does become of wire edges? If I have in fact created an unstable wire edge, then I guess I'll have learned my lesson the hard way, and will have to get this blade rehoned.

Ryan82: what shaving technique can prematurely dull a blade?