Thread: Am I missing something !

Originally Posted by markbignosekelly

I've been using my gokumyo 20k for a few months now and dont need to use any pastes/sprays afterwards, why spend so much money on a stone then finish with some cro ox that costs a couple of quid?!
Like Birnardo said to really benefit from this stone your straight has to be shave ready before it touches it.
Gx2japan-messer-shop.de sell the gokumyo line as well but its still cheaper to buy from toolsfromjapan.

Dang it.
I always mess up where I got my Suehiros in Europe.
Luckily you are there to save me every time

As far as I am concerned, pastes are abrasives, in other words they are very fine hones. In essence, honing a razor is just removing metal in smaller and smaller steps with finer and finer abrasives. Even what we term as 'polishing' or 'burnishing' is really just metal removal at a microfine degree. With very fine abrasives the most obvious sign of metal removal is removal or refinement of the scratch pattern on the bevel. Plastic deformation may play a part at the ultra thin apex where the bevels meet (the cutting edge) but the rest of the bevel, particularly the shoulder, is much thicker, yet the polishing effect is just as visible there.

As for what is responsible for the quality/feel of that cutting edge then it is glaringly obvious to me that it is the last abrasive used, be that a finishing hone or a paste/powder/spray. An analogy is painting woodwork. You used to have a matte finish primer coat, usually a different colour to the undercoat. Then came a matte finish undercoat the same colour as the gloss coat. At this point, the sanded primer was invisible. Only the undercoat registered on our senses, After sanding came the gloss coat. If it was too transparent and revealed streaks of primer it was further refined by sanding again and applying another coat of gloss. At this stage only the fineness of the final coat registered on our senses. Who else cared - or even knew - all the preparation that preceded the final coat?

I see the razors edge in the same way. Coarse edge? Not enough prep. Score marks? Not enough refinement. Won't shave? Not enough time spent getting the bevel right. Etc, etc, etc. Which brings up the quality of the edge left by an earlier hone. If the bevel is perfect, if there are no micro-chips, if there is no false edge/wire edge/burr/fin, then perfection for that particular hone has been achieved and all the characteristics, scratch pattern, etc of the hone before it has been removed.

Any of the hones we use can achieve that degree of perfection. Steel is steel, metal removal is all that counts. Can you get better than perfection? In this modern world of hyperbole where the stupidity of giving something 110% is commonplace it is tempting to answer yes, but the correct reply is of course, no. Likewise with hones.

So, if I use paste, the edge I shave with is a pasted edge. If I use a 16k hone and no paste then I am shaving off that 16k hone.

When people used to shave of 8k hones, then the jump from 8k to, say, green chrome oxide at around 30k was one hell of a jump. However, we are used to 16ks, and some of us use 20ks and 30ks, so the jump is far less and the effect of the paste much more pronounced after high grits than lower grits.

I have left stropping on fabric and leather out of the discussion. To me, they have a very refined burnishing effect too, but as we have to strop it cannot be removed from the equation, so I am treating it as having an equal effect of all edges.

Finally,

1. I talked to Dieter from the german site that used to stock the SG20, but he couldn't get a good enough cut from them, so it does not look like he will be offering them in the near future.

2. As far as Sham is concerned, he may well be a legend on his own website but he is just another honer as far as I am concerned. He is a bloke, like most of us, and like most of us he is often wrong. What works for him is great - for him. Others of us have our own ways which work perfectly well.

3. As for A-J selling eschers for cheap, I've never seen that. I even have trouble with some of his so-called 'vintage thuringians' and, like any sensible person, his vastly inflated grit ratings.

4. The type of questions we are attempting to answer have been asked by others before us, many times. The only answer is that there is no definite answer, so we are left with just our opinions. The whole thing is subjective, and no doubt with the right amount of prompting a gullible person could be led to believe that a 4k Norton was the finishing hone par excellence - remember the story of the Emperors New Clothes? That sort of self-delusion occurs every time a decent 'new' hone hits the headlines.

The above is just my opinion. It may well be worthless and wrong. But it does not matter. We can explain things in any fashion we like, no matter how outlandish, but as long as the product performs to expectations then who cares?

Regards,
Neil

Originally Posted by Neil Miller

As for what is responsible for the quality/feel of that cutting edge then it is glaringly obvious to me that it is the last abrasive used, be that a finishing hone or a paste/powder/spray.

That was my reasoning, i still keep seeing statements though such as "i love the finish off my [insert stone], a few strokes on a pasted strop then a good strop on leather and im good to go". I guess its peoples individual perception of where the edge they are using has come from but like you i would say its from the paste and not the stone

The stones obviously play a big role in that you need to get to the stage where a paste is effective but that final edge is not the edge produced by the stone.

I stopped using pastes, but I think that sometimes its the combination of stones or mediums that brings the desired edge that someone wants. Lately I have been using my Jnat to give that nice smooth edge, but in the process it will lose some of the keenness that I like and a few strokes on my mystery hone will bring back some of that keenness without losing the smoothness. I wouldn't be able to get the best of both worlds with only finishing on my mystery hone alone. I have tried and the results aren't the same. I can shave quite comfortably off of either stones, but combined they take the edge alittle bit farther. I could just be complicating things since I have only honed about 100 razors and still haven't learned every trick with my stones yet, but getting there is the fun part.

I can do nothing here beyond offering my procedure and results. I never have used pastes or sprays of any kind. I strop my EDC knives with them but never my razors.
I hone through the Naniwa SS 12K then finish with 20 strokes on the Gokumyo 20K. I then strop on plain leather, 50 laps after honing, 100 after each shave. I find no harshness in the edge coming off the 20K, get wonderful shaves from it, and it has laid my expensive Escher to permanent rest.

when it comes to sham, what I've been trying to say is not that he a honing legend or anything, I've never had razor sharpened by him so I cannot say anything about his abilities myself. What I have been trying to say is that he is very anal about his finishing stones, only couple from couple hundred coticules he tried he was satisfied with, where most people would be satisfied with just an average coti.
When it comes to AJ's vintage Eschers and Thuringens I cannot comment on that, I don't own neither of the stones, However I am owner of his dragon's tongue and lynn meynllyn hones, which I bought not for grit rating but the reviews they got on this website. they were my first stones together with king ice bear 1/6K combo. I never had a professionally sharpened razor so it's hard to comment form me, but over last year and a half I've taught myself to hone on those stones. Shave I'm getting is very similar to shavette with derby blades, so comfortable for my face.
Rafal

Originally Posted by RafalS

when it comes to sham, what I've been trying to say is not that he a honing legend or anything, I've never had razor sharpened by him so I cannot say anything about his abilities myself. What I have been trying to say is that he is very anal about his finishing stones, only couple from couple hundred coticules he tried he was satisfied with, where most people would be satisfied with just an average coti.
When it comes to AJ's vintage Eschers and Thuringens I cannot comment on that, I don't own neither of the stones, However I am owner of his dragon's tongue and lynn meynllyn hones, which I bought not for grit rating but the reviews they got on this website. they were my first stones together with king ice bear 1/6K combo. I never had a professionally sharpened razor so it's hard to comment form me, but over last year and a half I've taught myself to hone on those stones. Shave I'm getting is very similar to shavette with derby blades, so comfortable for my face.
Rafal

Oh I agree - about him being very anal. However that is the stamp of a hard to please, fussy person, the type that is annoyingly critical about everything. For instance in the early days of R&S it was Sham's way or have ridicule heaped on your opinion (I did not fall into that category - I give as good or better than I get) and needless to say, most of the sheep decided to toe the party line. That's as good as megalomania in my opinion.

BTW it is wrong to say that the Dragons Tongues are A-Js stones as they are not and were commercially available on a large scale a good hundred years or more before he was born and on a smaller scale probably centuries before that. The name and the mine is the property of Inigo Jones, much espoused on this website long before A-J came along. You can buy direct from Inigo Jones and they will cut to size for you and if you order enough they lower the price. I believe the redoubtable Tony of Taylors1000 offers them now as well.

The same is true of the Llyn Melynllyn stone. It is mined by others and sold to A-J. So much has been written here about this stone that I would refer you to those other posts for a true story of it rather than A-Js pipe dreams.

As for your closing statement I couldn't agree more - it is your face and how it feels to you that is of paramount importance.

Regards,
Neil

Totally agree with you. When it comes to names I use for the hones, I just call them whatever AJ calls them. To be honest I think no one knows exactly what those stones are. There are threats comparing AJ and Indiogo dragons tongue and they look different, they sharpen different so they might not be the same slate, although all natural stones from the same quarry differ. Same with LM no one know where it comes from, no one knows what this slate is. Anyway I bought them because they were reasonably cheap and had good reviews, they work for me but that doesn't mean everyone will like them. It's like buying a car some people just want to go from A to B somehow for cheap, some need to get from A to B really fast like Pro honers.
Rafal

Flash back to 1984 or so. I was collecting straight razors and became good friends with a pro barber who was like minded. He had a 70 year old guy working for him who had been barbering for 50 years +. The old fellow sold me a coticule, the usual 5x2-1/2" stamped "Made In Belgium" on the side, that seemed to be the default stone of many old barbers in North NJ at that time.

He demonstrated his honing technique for me. A squirt of lather out of his lather king machine on the yellow, he said the blue was only a base and useless for honing (common opinion of that day and time) and he stressed "only 5 weight of the blade round trips or you will lose the edge."

So following that instruction I was doomed to failure. I had a few shave ready razors out of the 100 or so that I had accumulated and as they went too dull I never could bring them back with the 5 round trips. I soon gave up on it and went back to my Gillette "Good News" disposable for another 20 years.

All of the preceding drivel illustrates the point of why I have been so anti paste in my honing journey. When I came to SRP, began to give honing another go, this time with good information, I was on a mission to reverse my previous failure. So getting the best edge out of a hone, preferably finishing on a natural hone, became an obsession. Now at the same time, some of the best pro honers known to man have no qualms about a final finish with paste or spray.

Running into a harsh edge I've smoothed it mid shave with 10 round trips on chrom-ox. I've had to resort to diamond spray to achieve an acceptable finish on S-30V and ATS-34. So there have been times when I've went that way. I have OCD tendencies in some areas and it seems honing has been one of them. Intellectually I know that pastes/sprays are, as Neil so eloquently put it, merely another means to the desired end. Emotionally I cannot get my mind around it so I soldier on with my Escher y/g or my gokomyo 20k.

The hell of it is, when I finally got to where I could hone pretty good, taking Randydance's advice and shave testing off the 8k before I went up the grit ladder, I figured out that all I really needed was the 8k and a pasted paddle to get a DFS for the rest of my life. HAD and my aforementioned honing disorder precluded that but hey ........ some of us tend to take this far too seriously ........ it's a hobby after all is said and done.

Originally Posted by RafalS

Totally agree with you. When it comes to names I use for the hones, I just call them whatever AJ calls them. To be honest I think no one knows exactly what those stones are. There are threats comparing AJ and Indiogo dragons tongue and they look different, they sharpen different so they might not be the same slate, although all natural stones from the same quarry differ. Same with LM no one know where it comes from, no one knows what this slate is. Anyway I bought them because they were reasonably cheap and had good reviews, they work for me but that doesn't mean everyone will like them. It's like buying a car some people just want to go from A to B somehow for cheap, some need to get from A to B really fast like Pro honers.
Rafal

Ahh - you didn't read the old posts about the LM and the DT then? Suffice it to say you are mistaken - the mines where these came from are well known as they were required to be registered. Briefly, what confuses people is that the names used for these hones became a blanket term, like Hoover: in common usage 'hoover' came to be used for all vacuum cleaners, even though there was/is only one make called Hoover.

The LM has at least 4 varieties. Adrsprach (Stefan, a respected member here with a great knowledge of natural hones from the British Isles) has talked to an old-timer at Inigo Jones quarry and he confirmed that they supplied hones to others and sometimes when they were at full capacity others helped them out with stones, hence the several types of stone, apparently (but not in actuality) from a single quarry and their differing characteristics. The truth is that supply and demand being what it is, slate from several neighbouring quarries came to be sold by one quarry owner under his own blanket-name, in the case of LMs this was 'Yellow Lake Oilstone'. This is why we have purple varieties and several shades of grey to grey/black.

Be that as it may, the quarries that supplied the original stones are well-known.

Regards,
Neil