Thread: Is it the stone or the razor?

My 2c based on accumulated info here, and a fairly extensive metallurgical background. Just something to think about. May be completely off base. A study of a wide variety of blades in various condition at very high mag in an SEM would be an interesting exploration, albeit costly. I don't happen to have a personal SEM on which to do this. Any one wants to com up with $150K to contract with my lab to do the work, look me up ;- )

That said, those of you still reading...

Based on reading a lot of "field information" here, I might hazard a guess that some of the differences people notice may very well be variations in the microstructure of the steel of particular razors. Even two razors made out of the same original billet could end up behaving slightly differently on honing response and subsequent shave feel if the tempering cycle in the heat treat was slightly different (temperature, heating/cooling rate, and time at tempering temperature. Most of these blade steels in the final use condition are probably fairly fine grained (2-10µm grain size??? if I were guessing). You then have lots of grain boundaries intersecting the sharpened edge. I would suspect these steels are principally hardened by martensite structure (iron carbide). The tempering cycle refines the size of carbide precipitates on grain boundaries and sometimes within grains, too. To get this up to visualization level, imagine different hand saws. is a crosscut saw with really fine teeth, another has coarser teeth that are shaped for rip sawing, and another has medium pitch pull-saw-type teeth. At the microscopic level, the different blade edges may have this type of variations. One blade might be very hard and hone to a good edge, but the carbides are coarse and tend to chip off the edge easily. Maybe give the sense of harshness since the edge has a lot of really sharp sections, but they are interrupted periodically where the grain boundary carbides are dislodged. At the microscopic level of the blade edge, you are looking at an interrupted cutting edge. Another edge may have more refined carbides with better distribution. maybe this one doesn't hone to quite the edge, but comes up nicely when stropped. Might not hold its sharpness quite as well, but has the sense of a smoother shave.

YMMV - you have been forewarned this is just conjecture.

it seems od to me that your W&B blades specificly are less comfortable since this seems to be an extreamly popular brand of vintage razors and although this is not always based in reason I would imagine that they're at least not infirior steal, this leaves troubleshooting how you honed those blades.

you say al your blades are full holow ground, I thought that W&B blades often go towards a more wedge like blade instead. I would think that every step in the honing proces would take just a litle more time since you're honing away more steel then in a ful holow ground. How do you decide it's time to go to a different hone?

sometimes when I hone a blade from scratch and in the end it doesn't feel right I just butterknive the blade and start over (while thinking I probably left some microchips initially)

Originally Posted by RandyIdaho

... some words ...

I don't happen to have a personal SEM on which to do this.

... lots more words ...

just type SEM in the search on this site and you will find quite a lot of those pictures some of which even forming the bases for a study

there are not that manny types of steel used in straight razors and they're all high-carbon type steel