Thread: Is there a coating...

Glen, Neil,

Thanks for your further comments here. This goes a long way to making sense out of what's happening (and not happening) for me here.

I shall keep at this.

I was thinking this afternoon that maybe I need to get a 1k stone, and start all the way down there. Maybe this is premature. I'll keep going at it with the 5k.

Now...where did I leave that DMT? Oh yeah, left it in the garage after sharpening the lawn mower blade... (kidding).

-Brenton

Today I thought I should lap my Naniwa 3k/8k because it has been used on a number of razors since I last lapped it. To lap my hones I have been using a glass plate and sheets of wet and dry paper. So I drew a grid on each side of my combination stone and lapped off the grid. After about two laps on the glass plate with wet and dry paper I could see that my hone was indeed curved. A few laps later the grid was gone and I had a lot of slurry. This time I had the time to be pedantic. So instead of just going to finer paper and giving it a few laps until I thought it was smooth I drew a grid again and gave it one or two laps and checked again. It turns out that the curve was still there and the slurry was washing away the grid.

So I went through the whole process a couple more times. Draw the grid then lap the grid off. But this time I did it under running water.

What this experience tells me is that I was trying to hone razors with a curved hone. This might also be what is giving you the impression that your hone has some sort of coating. Even if it does have a coating I think it should still be able to hone, but if it is curved that might be a different story.

Interesting discovery there Nathan. I admit I only drew one grid per lapping, so I could be having this going on as well.

I am among the speckled.

I have virtually lapped my 1K and 5K to the bone. Actually lapped once and cleaned on a GDLP daily.

Lynn

Update to this important story


I went ahead and lapped the 8k stone last night, then too honed the razor on the 5, 8, and 12k keeping the advice above in mind that the sharpness tests don't work as expected off these stones.

Forgetting to strop, I took the razor for a test spin on my not-too-thick bead (shaved in the morning with a new blade in the DE).

Razor really glided over the skin -- no pull, like it was before I got into this whole fiasco with re-sharpening.

Maybe it was the not so thick beard.

Stropped this morning -- now it was popping hairs.

Shaved, and again, smoothly across the skin. None of the tearing the hair out by the handful feeling.

It's not as close a shave as with the DE, but I'm still learning my technique. I must admit.