Thread: My honing experience so far

I am sure this all sounds like the same ol' but I thought I would share my honing experience. I am new to honing razors but have some experience in knives. I got a Norton 4k/8K that I lapped in with a Norton dressing stone, a Japanese waterstone, also lapped and a balsa board with Tormek honing paste.
My razor is new to me and in great shape. I started with just stropping it and it would shave ok in the light weeds but was kinda rough in the thicker. I tried Lynn's refresher method and the razor seemed worse, then tried the full hone method with no improvement. So I decided to lightly kill the edge then I tried his full hone method again and it didn't improve much. After a few more tries followed with, hitting it on the 12k stone and always finishing with the strop, I saw some improvement and thought It would be OK to try a shave with it. It did OK, I was able to do my full face down stroke only without any snags and it definitely did much better on my thick chin area. I felt like it could do better so I gave it one more shot but this time I added in about 100 strokes on the treated balsa followed with canvas and leather stropping. It finally cleanly passed the HHT and easily cuts my arm hair. I haven't tried to shave with it but I confident it should do just fine.
So, now I am wondering was it the run on the treated balsa that finally got it their or was it just that it took that many hones to get the edge proper. Every video I have seen on honing, no one seems to need to go much beyond a what Lynn does in his normal hone video. What is a bit bewildering to me is the cutting edge looks and feels the same when performing the thumb pad test as before I started all this honing.
For the time being, I am assuming that shaving and stropping will only make the edge better. Hopefully future hones will only be of the light touch up type.