update and thanks

Hello everyone,

I've been using the straight for about a week now. It has been quite an experience. I'm trying to do it all at once; learning honing, shaving, stroping at the same time. Today I finally got my first decent shave. I finally am starting to get a sharp edge on the blade and learning to shave the goatee area (before I was doing that part so badly that I was inadvertly growing a goatee!).

You guys were a great help with the honing, esp. Randy. I finally slowed down and improved my honing technique. I was putting too much pressure on the blade and not being careful about going the same distance in each direction on the hone. Also, I started to use the honing ratios which I think really helps. Now my straight is decently sharp, at about the point where I would consider tossing a DE blade in a shave or two. I'm using the conservative ratios after each shave to get the blade to the perfect sharpness.

My shaving technique improved drastically with the help of the video on this site. I can get a good shave on most of my face and am only struggling with the chin and area around the mouth. I got that area reasonably close today, so I'm improving. I'm now just experimenting as to what works best. I also am happy that it was easy to start using both hands; it felt normal after a couple shaves. I think it is best to just start using both hands right off the bat when learning.

So thank you to everyone here for abundance of information. It would have been much more difficult learning the basics of what and how I need to work on without this site.