Long-ish honing story for you....

In the fall, I decided to sell off all but one of my straight razors to fund the purchase of a new electric guitar. I kept a Dovo Best Quality 6/8 - because it is the only new razor I had and I had paid a lot for it, and didn't want to take a bath on the sale price. I even sold my Dubl Duck Wonderedge!!! bad idea....

Fast forward to December, and I wake up one day and say - "Hey - I think I want to get back into straight razor shaving....". I dug out the Dovo and have been using it daily since.

I will need to touch it up on the hone soon, and I have not honed a razor since last year, and remembered that as part of 2010's great acquisition binge that I got a raw deal on a Genco off Etsy - it showed up so black with tarnish that I nearly threw it away (I wish I had a pico of the darn thing when it arrived). I went at it last year with some sandpaper for a while and then gave up....and stashed it away. I decided to dig it out yesterday and hone it up as a 'practice razor' to get back into honing.

I went at it with 320 grit, followed by 400, 600, 800, 1000 and 1500. Followed it up with some Autosolv polish. It is still quite pitted, especially at the spine,, but he lower part of the blade seems OK. I wasn't happy with the tarnish left in the pits etc. so I dug out some Maas and went at it. It came up better with the Maas, and I was happy to discover that there was no pitting into the edge. I decided that I was not going to go for perfection, and left it as is.

Anyway - the point of this ramble is that I honed the darn thing. I decided to use gssixgun's JaNorton technique (I watched those videos over and over last year), and I had copied the following out of a post here on SRP - as part of the JaNorton form last year - and decide to use this to practice honing this Genco (not sure who's method this is):

Prep:
Killed the edge on the scuttle, confirm with a TNT.
apply tape
Razor is the 13/16 Globusmen
4K
Circles with slurry, around 30 with firm pressure
Then another round of circles(20) with medium pressure.
5 reg strokes
5 x-strokes
5 reg strokes
TNT, bevel ready. Pops hair all along the edge
5 "finishing" strokes
Bevel ready in literally 2 minutes!

8K

5 reg strokes
5 x-strokes

Pyramid:

4k: 5 strokes
8k: 10 strokes
4k: 3 strokes
8k: 10 strokes

Finishing 8k:

Change tape
Clean off hone
Wipe off excess water and "20 laps to dry"


I decided not to use tape, and used a King 1K I just bought to set the bevel, rather than use the 4K. I did the '20 circles to sharp' technique that Glenn has described, and it worked like a hot damn! The blade popped hair on my arm after the 1K. The bevel setting was super quick...like the post said, I had the bevel done in no time.

I followed the steps above (including slurry on the 4k), dried it and put it away tip this morning's shave. and.........

OMG!!!! What a shave!!! What did I do???

Somehow this butt-ugly razor shaves as well as any razor I have used to date!

I am so pleased that I was able to hone this razor. Its a skill I am glad to have made some small steps towards learning, and look forward to understanding more and more of this 'craft'.

Thanks to all the tips on this site, and specifically the JaNorton / gssixgun tips I gleaned last year.

Happy New Year!!

Barry