I got tired of ok shaves and had a thousand questions about honing repairing and maintaining st razors so I enticed lynn to drive over to indy from ohio for the day...what a great experience I honed probably 20 razors learned what to look at under a microscope...learned how to take out nicks and half moons, how to tighten pins and polish and take out blemishes... I still need lots of practice but my work is pretty good...shaved with one of the newly honed razors and the difference was night and day...no drag no razor burn ...shaved with a few passes...a great experience...lynn showed me several honing tricks ...he spent about 8 hrs with me honing smoking cigars and talking about razrs what collectable and what to stay away from...the guy is a walking encyclopedia of st razrs not to mention he brought over about 60 of his razrs not his best pieces still 4 of them are still here and not in his collection...he is a great guy and the point of this post is that for all you newbies and semi mewbies such as myself you can cut your learning time and really enjoy the art of shaving with these razors if you can find a friend or someone on this forum knowledgeable who is near your geo area who can teach you the art of shaving and stroping and honing a straight razor...charlie