Thread: Buying Vintage Hones?

So I'm looking at buying a hone and I really don't feel like spending 100+ dollars on a hone but I don't want to get a piece of crap. Do you think it would be wise to purchase a vintage hone from ebay. I know that I would most likely have to lap it several times and make sure that it is even and flat. Has any one ever bought an old vintage hone off ebay with any success and not just for aesthetic purposes.

It depends on the use you want to make with your stone. If you are planning to have just one stone, maybe a combo stone is the best choice, say a Norton 4k/8k or a Naniwa 3k/8k, both being cheaper than 100$.
As for natural stone, an excellent choice would be a Belgian cuticule with a bout, useful in creating slurry and this would be useful in lowering the grit of the stone in case you need to refresh a dull edge.
Never bought a vintage stone on eBay but I see there are a lot of them there.
If you are a beginner in honing I would suggest you to buy a brand new and freshly lapped stone. A concave or not perfectly lapped stone, like a vintage one, is not the best way to learn honing and it could even worse the quality of the bevel.

I don't think it's particularly wise strategy. How do you know that what you get on ebay only needs lapping and isn't just a 'piece of crap' as you put it?

The thing is that generally there is no free lunch so to save money you have to trade something else for it. You don't have experience to trade, so that means that you'll be gambling. Gambling could work out really well, but also could have the exact opposite result, especially given that you have a rather shallow pocket and can't afford enough gambling rounds to get to the statistical average.

You could also try to trade in time - basically sit as much as possible on ebay and hope to find a hone of well known quality say escher (with a label) for a very low price and buy-it-now option, and notice it and manage to snag it before anybody else. These events are extremely rare, especially nowadays and I am pretty sure if you spend the same time it's gonna take you to chase such an event, if you spend this same amount of time doing any low skilled min. wage job, you'd earn several times the market price of that escher.

I don't really think you have a particularly good option here, which is no surprising because if you had everybody would already be doing it.

If you ask me, I'd suggest that you start by considering what do you need a hone for. Not the meaningless answer 'to hone my razor', but take the time to read up and learn about honing.
If you concentrate on stropping instead and do that part right you will dramatically extend the time before your razor needs to touch a hone. And you may realize that you don't need a $100+ hones and the $20 chinese hone may serve you just fine.

Well thanks for the speedy replies its not so much that I don't have the money for say a norton. It's just that, I figured like razors that some of the older hones would be better than some of the new ones. And if I can save some money and still get a quality, well then why not. But I think that I will end up just going with the naniwa or more likely the norton combo.

Originally Posted by cosperryan

Well thanks for the speedy replies its not so much that I don't have the money for say a norton. It's just that, I figured like razors that some of the older hones would be better than some of the new ones. And if I can save some money and still get a quality, well then why not. But I think that I will end up just going with the naniwa or more likely the norton combo.

From a frugal standpoint your best bet, IMO, is a norton 4/8 combo. The 'old reliable' that at one time was the only game in town besides the vintage hones. Guys will tell you to get a barber hone, a coticule, lapping film ....... just get a norton combo and you'll have a tool that will get you from point A to point B for sure. Add other options as time goes on, if you decide you want or need them. Just IME.

I'm with Jimmy. The Norton is the old reliable. You can never go wrong with it.

Probably with synthetic hones the newer ones are probably better than the old because of the newer materials they have and better manufacturing standards. Not that there is anything wrong with the old ones , they work fine.

My advice would be to get one of the vintage linens that say "silk finish" on them. There was just one on ebay today....it, uh...someone purchased it They are difficult to find sometimes in NOS shape, there's no great reason to get one that looks dirty and full of metal particles or abrasives as they don't really remove much metal if someone didn't put something on them. Far less than chromium oxide or iron oxide.

I have been shaving with one for about a year, maybe a little longer. The only time I have honed in the last 9 months was when someone asked me what I thought of their stone, and each time it degraded the edge that was already there and I needed a couple of shifts on the linen to get it back.

A vintage linen like that (which should be available for about $40) will step up a crap stone as long as the finish level is somewhere in the 6-8k range, though it will take a couple of repetitions if it's like 6k coarse.

I'm convinced that when people used to make those linens (they are loaded with a waxy chalk like substance) back when people used to shave and not necessarily want to go to a hone they couldn't afford, they really knew what they were doing, and there's something to them - the stiffness and the waxy stuff in them - that's missing from modern linens.

Anyway, if you get a hold of one of those types of linens, the stone won't matter as much because you only need to visit the stone once every 6 months or so.

I say this not due to lack of exposure, I have tried pretty much every expensive natural stone out there and a good vintage linen will step all of them up several notches and make them all feel dull.

Like gugi says, though we are very hone centric (and I do have about 50 or 60 stones for various different things), the secret if you're just shaving is in the strop (and strop means the strop and the linen). Have to have a good quality strop, too, because there are a lot of new strops out there that will take what the linen does for my razor and step it down a couple of notches in sharpness and comfort, and that's a shame.

Also, if you want budget, a hard chinese hone is a good thing, but learn to use it with and without slurry. It will cut fast and coarse on a heavy slurry, and finely without. Not bevel setter fast necessarily on slurry, but plenty fast to maintain any razor that's in shaving shape.

Huh, thats pretty interesting about the "silk finish" linen. I wonder who might have purchased it... Haha. But I was reading under the wiki here and it was about bevels and it said that the bevel of a razor that is mostly maintained with pasted strops, which I am assuming is basically what your strop that your talking about is, will end up having a rounded bevel. It said that it will still be keen and shave worthy but once it does come time to finally hone that a lot of metal will have to be taken off to get back to a flat even bevel.

I suppose it's sort of like a pasted strop, but the linen is fairly hard and stiff and at the same time the abrasive is a lot more gentle than aluminum oxide, iron oxide or chromium oxide (and by that much more gentle than diamonds). It's a bizarre feeling thing the first time you use it, makes a zipper sound and makes you feel sure it's ripping apart the bevel, but nothing happens other than that a little tiny bit of the residue is on the edge of the razor. You clean it off and go.

In terms of the rounding, some of that might be mitigated by the fact that the linen is very stiff, and also that it hardly removes anything. After 50 uses, it's not even gray, where as most of the more aggressive posts will be gray in one use. The last time I honed a razor, I used one that hadn't been honed in about four months (I only use one razor at a time, so that's basically 115 shaves or so) and a touch up was easy on a frictionite 825 (which is basically the fine side of a frictionite barber hone but in a bench stone size, it's not quite as aggressive as a modern 12,000 grit hone like a superstone, etc).

It's just much more sparing with the metal on a razor, basically, but not in a way that compromises its ability to keep a razor edge clean and sharp.

I personally think something has been lost between when those vintage loaded strops were made and now, but I've never seen anything about what's on them and what the underlying linen (without the loading) is like. The pro strop makers on here might know more. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that type of linen could make a razor last half a lifetime or a lifetime. The bismarck that I've been using for a year+ probably has 400 shaves on it and it has no visible wear of any type on any part of it. That's a big contract from when I started shaving and my razors got a light hone every one to two weeks.

Yes, I should've made it clear that for effective maintenance you need fabric component strop, not just leather. There are some old threads with experiments on the difference the fabric component makes.

I have tons of strops but have been using essentially one of them (plus a vintage kanayama shell for 10-20 laps at the end). The fabric component on it is cotton, that is treated with something waxy - that's the most common vintage strop as far as I can tell. This one started brand spanking new looking and over the first month started graying and now few years later is fairly black. That's the iron oxide from the razors I've stropped and it seems a good thing on a strop. I am not sure what is currently the dominant abrasive, the iron oxide or whatever treatment the strop started with, but if I'm to bet I'd say they're likely comparable.
I've also used plain vintage cotton, linen and few different treatments and they all work.