Thread: Help me with my Norton

We all learn differently. To my mind, your experience to date with the Norton loading up with swarf in particular parts of the hone would have told me more about the razor and hone than I could ever hope to understand by asking other people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising you or trying to make out I'm smarter - but why not just carry on with what you have and learn from experience?

True and i understand Rob. but point blank all of this is relaxing, zin, and all around a joy for me. So learning to hone (which can be a frustrating learning curve) is unnecessary but its fun and i figure why not start now since i dont really use this certain straight.

I suppose I'm wondering for myself here, looking at his original picture I'm not exactly sure what his issue is. He should expect there to be some metal to be shed onto the stone should he not? I feel Lynn Abrams had some build up during his video but he made sure to keep adding water to the face of the stone to move that around. Also, I use norton's and fresh out of the box I lapped them twice with the pencil grid technique. Mr. Abrams had mentioned that new norton stones come out on the rough side and need a little extra work to smooth them out and recommended that.

As I began honing, and granted I am inexperienced, knowing I had a few problem spots on my blade I noticed those marks left on the stone, and I also could feel those blade imperfections on the stone, and as it seemed the stone wore those probelm spots away, the marks also appeared less and less and generally were located around the problem areas to begin with. I felt the marks were more feedback about the blade than indicative of a problem with my stone.

Originally Posted by aBam916

Im a newbie honer but know enough..
i lapped my hone but when i use it this happens.. please helpAttachment 196850

Looking at the photo of your hone I would make two comments.

First if I'm getting that much swarf on my 8K then either the surface of the stone is way to rough and needs to be lapped off significantly (as in lap it till I get to a smooth grit) not just flat. Some new Norton stones need a couple of MM's lapped off to get to a good working surface as the top layer is not serviceable. OR

You just haven't done enough 4k work, one way to tell if your 4k work is complete is to see how much swarf comes of the edge when you put it to a properly conditioned 8k surface.
We are polishing at this 8k stage and seeing allot of swarf is a very good indication that we have not maxed out our 4k level.

Lynn has done a vid on youtube on lapping stones and talks about having to lap some Nortons up to an 1/8 inch off the top before he finds the surface he's after, this could be part of the problem with this stone.

When I started honing I used the Norton system and I found the link that Glen(gssixgun) has given here to be an invaluable tool to my overall success, I read everything I could find on this forum about honing on the Nortons. Then I got a mentor and spent some time one on one to see how to hone, I had lots of honing experience on knives and tools, razors are allot different IMHO, YMMV

I should add that I skipped the 4k honing and went right to the 8k as it was suggested that may be all I need for basically a touch up honing. So the swarf I had was expected because I probably could have given it a little time on the 4k first but chose kind of to work backwards being that I was new to the stones and figured I should try the least invasive approach first. So it took a few extra passes on the 8k than a normal touch up because I did have a small knick in the edge that I needed to work out and seem to have. If I couldnt get it feeling smooth on the 8k then I was gonna go down from there and then back up, but don't feel the blade needed all that work as it was a new razor getting it's first touch up.