Thread: Pressure!

If you have areas that aren't hitting while you hone with fairly light pressure on the finer hones, what I would do first is double check that all the stones are reasonably close to flat. If this checks out, I'd go back to a coarser stone and work out the geometry issue you apparently still have.

You can use heavier pressure on a bevel setting stone, but before you progress to a finer stone, you need to go to very light pressure on the bevel setter and be sure you are still getting full contact all along the edge. If you don't have full contact at the lighter pressure on the coarser stone you need to do more light pressure honing until you do.

This is one of the reasons that using pressure is kind of a slightly advanced technique. To use selective pressure in such a case you want to preferably use a narrower stone and apply the pressure only on the areas you are already making contact - the purpose being to remove steel from those "high" areas so they are no longer holding the "low" areas (that aren't making contact with the stone) away from the hone.

Alternatively, if you have a razor that is way out of whack and don't want to remove a ton of steel you can use narrower stones for all the work and that will allow the razor to hit all along the edge a bit easier as well.