Quote Originally Posted by JimmyHAD View Post
+1. I don't do anything but X strokes, rolling X, unless it is circles or 'back and forth' while bevel setting. I don't know anyone who would do 'straight strokes' since the hone may have a certain amount of irregularity even shortly after a fresh lapping.
If the hone doesn't, there's a decent chance that the razor will.

As far as the sizes go, when people honed razors for a living (talking about barbers) regularly, and the market was professionals for the choice stones, and not us deep pocketed amateurs, they knew what size they needed. (speaking of the 5x2, 5x2.5, etc). Going smaller than what they used when people generally didn't buy more than they needed is suboptimal.

Could I or anyone else hone a razor with a quarter of a bench stone? Sure. Would I want to purchase an inexpensive razor off of ebay that needed significant work and use it with these small stones? Definitely not.

I'd rather have something inexpensive, like the sometimes sets of old king stones that pop up on ebay (like an 800 and a 6000 or 8000) for cheap and if inexpensive doesn't go fine enough, there are tons of stones that do.