Thread: Barber hone shenanigans - Pike, Celtes, Raven, and glass hone

I finally got around to playing around with the barber hones I recently acquired. Long post, but starting with pics:





Hones left to right: Pike, Raven, Celtes, and Glass.

Razors left to right: Gold Dollar, Shapleigh Hardware 53, Torrey Round point, Torrey Barber Notch

Shave test: Gold Dollar passed, Shapleigh failed, Torrey Round - barely passable, Barber notch - best of the bunch.

The Gold Dollar just needed a touch up and was previously honed on my PHIG. It was still in shaving order, so it got a few laps on the rough side of the Pike, then finished on the fine/red side. I would say the Pike is a bit of a sleeper hit, I was expecting it to be a so-so hone. But I like the little fellow. It's just a little small, even for a barber hone. This is particularly troublesome with the coarse side, since it has the stamp on it. The coarse side seemed to do about what my Norton 4K would/did. Maybe a little bit finer. The red side provided a surprising amount of polish. By the time all was said and done it shaved about as well as it did when honed off the C12K, not bad at all.

The Shapleigh I'm not too surprised failed the test. It was previously honed on a Jnat and shaving very nicely. So I decided to use it as a test bed for the Raven hone. To my dismay, while goofing around with it I created a burr. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to fix it with a very like stroke on the edge of my Norton 4K - which made a couple of decent sized chips I now had to work out. In retrospect, perhaps I should've just honed that foiled edge off...

So I set about honing out the minor chip on the stone I made it with - the Norton 4K. Followed by a few strokes on both sides of the Pike and finished on the Raven hone. The fact that it failed probably means it needs to re-visit the 4K because it's work wasn't done. Not a reflection of the hone itself, just an edge that needs more work. I'm kinda miffed at myself for ruining this edge because it was shaving really, really nicely.

The Torrey round point - previously honed on a different Cnat. ZY #3000 specifically. It was shaving pretty smooth, almost like a coticule, but not very keen at all. In light of this, I just touched it up on the Celtes. I'm sure with a proper touch up, this would work out better. I went back and forth with this one a bit, but inevitably decided that though it kinda passes I want to take it back to the 4K and try again. Give it a better touch up than I did tonight.

And last, the Torrey w/ barber notch - This razor actually wasn't shaving right, so tonight I took the opportunity to remedy that. Close examination showed a bevel that wasn't quite set, and some chips that needed removal. Norton 4K until that was taken care of, then off to the glass hone.

The instruction on it said to rub with a pencil (?) or slate...I'm assuming that means build a slurry and use like a slurry stone. And it worked magnificently as such. I used 2 Welsh slates, the rubbing stone from my Dragon's Tongue, and the 15K Black slate from AJ for the job. I started with the DT and made a thick slurry that I used to rid the blade of all the 4K stria. Then I made a milky slurry with the 15K that I diluted in 3 stages. Final round was a few passes on pure water.

I have to say the glass stone was my favorite to use. I've used the Dragon's Tongue to set a few bevels, and played around with all the Welsh Slates and slurry to a degree. So this was pretty intuitive and easy to pickup. The thick slurry probably overlapped the work done on the 4K a bit, and contributed to the overall success achieved with this little hone. I like it enough I did the second pass with just this blade. I'd say the end result would be equivalent to if I had used the Welsh slates themselves to finish the edge.

All in all, not a bad first run. I'll clean the other 2 up again later to get a better assessment of the Raven and Celtes, but the Glass stone is at least as good as the slurry rocks it's used with, and the Pike is a good finisher with a pretty good mid-level rough side for those times when a quick touch up just isn't cutting it.