Thread: Trying to clarify my understanding

Originally Posted by regularjoe

To coticule enthusiasts: Please just leave me out of your nonsense. I don't need anybody grading my helpfulness. The most helpful thing I can do for the OP is suggest synthetics first. This is advice borne of experience far beyond a handful of coticules. Although it does stand to reason that if someone spent four years using a coticule, he'd probably have a pretty good handle on it.

The reason I drew you into this was not so much because I was irritated or took offence by your particular post. It just strikes me that often when someone comes in here asking questions about naturals - often coticules, as they are popular - a standard reply seems to be: "don't bother just yet, buy a Norton 4k/8k, then perhaps a cheap PHIG and a 1k bevel setter." Honing on a coticule is not that insanely difficult, I don't understand why it seems that people need to be almost warned against them, mainly because of their fickleness.

Maybe my response was a bit too directly aimed at you, of course your advice may be useful and is probably genuine (inasfar as I can judge because I don't know you). And I have nothing per se against advising synthetics. It just seems that some people have problems with people advising coticules. Which I didn't do, but still. The OP asked a whole bunch of questions, mainly concerning coticules and your advice came across as, shall I say, overly concise, whith no explanation whatsoever. I think you can say that the self-evident nature of your answer bothered me.

As I said, I have honed on coticules for two years but got decent shaving results within the first month, as decent as can be expected of someone who started honing two months after he started shaving.

As a final note, I admit that me honing from start to finish with one natural hone (okay, and a bevel setter) is borne from a sort of romanticism, yes. So is me shaving with a straight razor. For me, that is one important reason I got into this, the other main reason being that I didn't get good shaves before. Personally, I don't need to get identical, predictable results every time. If I would have got great, consistent results from the get go it would have felt like cheating - I probably would have felt like I was only pretending to be old-school with 21st century equipment. Now that might make me weird, but that is why I consciously did not start on synthetics. Honing is part of my straight shaving experience that I enjoy as much as shaving itself. I hone for pleasure, not just to get a good edge.

If people feel more comfortable with the apparent consistent, predictable results synthetics provide, I say power to them (honestly, without any sarcasm). If honing razors is part of your job and you hone a lot, I understand the need for consistent and predictable, because you can't shave with every razor you hone. I just don't understand some of the apparent hostility against using a piece of rock that has played a considerable role in the straight shaving tradition and being entusiastic about it in a, I admit, geeky way. But then again, many aspects of this hobby are geeky, without it there would be hardly any straight razor community left.

Jimbo, you make it sound like I'm in a weird cult. I don't think people who love Eschers are fanatics, or people who love honing on Japanese naturals. That "flock" of that "mythology built upon pseudo-scientific principles" also consists out of many people who couldn't care less about how insanely awesome garnets magically eat away steel like a crystalized version of Pac-man, but for whom it just simply works. Just like people for whom doing a honing pyramid on a Norton 4k/8k just works, who don't care why it works.