Thread: Honing progress but still think I have a ways to go

After honing a razor today I looked at it through the 30x loop. Still not sure what I am looking for. I was really just doing a touch up and started with a coticle with light to medium slurry. After, I did several more X strokes on both the coticule and the Thuri (75) to finish and noticed through the loop that the bevel had a very clean, polished look to it. Any scratches were very light and were oriented straight up and down down as well. The razor passed the HHT on multiple points along the surface but I'm interested in some feedback from you. I am very interested in how to get better at this.

Sounds like you have the basics down if the bevel looks good and you have a solid HHT.

Probably the best thing you can do now is just practice a lot. But here are some suggestions, as always YMMV.

Try honing hand held if you haven't. With the hone sitting flat, not gripped, on your off hand, if your stroke is uneven you can feel the stone rotate and you'll be able to correct your stroke.

Try following the coticule honing methods at coticule.be and try varying the slurry a bit.

Try palm stropping after leather then retest HHT.

Try different pressures with the coti.

Start looking carefully at the razor's spine and bevel wear patterns and think about what they mean and how you can hone to help that pattern if it is not good.

Generally with the loupe you're looking to see if the previous hone's marks have been fully erased, and there are no "sparklies", roughness, or general funkiness at the apex. You should probably not be able to actually see the apex if it's properly done depending on the magnification of course.

Hope this helps a litlle and good honing!

Cheers, Steve

So how the scratches look on the bevel, depends on the power of the magnification. Low power looks fine, high power looks deep.
While you don’t want deep scratches, (they end in chips on the edge), what matters is the edge. Are the edges meeting?

Once the edges are completely meeting then you want to progressively make the stria smaller and shallower to get a straighter edge.

So look straight down on the edge, looking for any shiny spots, where the bevels are not meeting, chips or a rolled edge. You can see reflection on the edge with the naked eye, any magnification makes it easier.

HHT only tells you that 1 micron of the blade that cut the hair is meeting, it tells you nothing about the rest of the blade. Takes a second to look at it and be sure you are improving an edge. You can just as easily for any number of reasons damage the edge. You just want to make sure you are continuing to make forward progress. Here is where new guys get into trouble, chasing rabbit holes that do not matter, HHT, shiny bevels and other "test". Keep it simple.

If you are using a Coticule or Thüringen, you could get them to meet but may take some laps, depending on how bad the edge was to begin with. The trick with slurry is to continue to refine the bevel without damaging the edge. If your slurry is too thick, you are beating the edge against it as you are refining the bevel. It becomes a balancing act. With synthetics you don’t have that problem because you do not use slurry. The actually edge is very fragile.

You need much higher magnification than 400x to see the edge, SEM type magnification. You really don’t need to see the edge, just make sure there are no chips. Then continue to refine the edge making the bevels as smooth as possible.

Here are a couple of edge photos at 60X, the first one shows shiny spots, chips.

The second photo, the bevels are meeting and all you see is a the fuzzy edge below the bright line on the top.. The bright line is not the edge it is reflection from the side of the bevel, red is tape. If you rotate the razor back and forth a few degrees you will see reflections on the edge if they are not meeting.