Thread: How often to hone?

I have been looking at picking up some sharpening stones as I plan to continue using my straight razors for years to come, love it! Anyways how often do you actually need to hone a razor? Versus just refreshing it? Is it mostly you just refresh and only hone a blade that is damaged? Eventually I will want to get into actually honing I am sure as I pick up razors from here or there, in the mean time both my current razors are in good condition should I just get like a 12k and continue to refresh for now?

In theory, if you had a quality barber hone or a high grit finisher you may never need to do a full honing. If you wanted to be practical and do it on the low cost you would send your meager rotation out and then just maintain them. However most of us have rad and buy large numbers of razors and restore older one so we buy the hones so we can get it all done. The cost of a full set of hones is a lot of honings from a pro. There are guys here that do not do their own honing and have been using pros for a very long time. Nobody has to hone, some just want to.

Well that may be the best way to go, may have to get me a 12k finisher just for my refreshes then

I'm kind of dealing with the same question right now. My RAD isn't full fledged yet, but I'd be willing to guess I'll have a full "week's set" by the end of the year. I'm leaning toward just picking up a a 12K stone for maintaining the pro hones and when I start to feel a pull I can't correct, send them out to Lynn or one of the others on here for their expert care.

you can get a 15K barber hone for way less.

Rez where could I source said barber stone?

first do a little research to find out which one to get. A good place for that is razor and stone where modine has been doing a lot of test and determining of the grit equivalence of barber hones. Then start to look at vendors selling barber hones or ebay. They are not a current production item. There are also many members that have many and a want add in the classifieds might be a good plan too.

Will have to check that out thank you

Try a want ad for barber hones. They haven't been made in years.

In theory one can never hone. ever for good shaving razors, see:

http://straightrazorpalace.com/strop...xperiment.html

(I'd rather rely on pastes* than barber hones.)

*not all of them, there are dozens.

I've been looking at the one discussed in This thread (the full size one)...thanks for the replies guys and thanks OP for posting this.

On the good side, SRP is a great source of info. On the bad, SRP is a GREAT source of info...off to the mines!