Thread: Honing help needed

I'm a novice, but everyone here recommends getting your blade professionally honed the first time, since it's more important to develop shaving skill first. Partially because honing is learned, and you're more likely to make things worse the first time than better.

Two things. First, never practice honing or cut your teeth on your primary razor. Because, as you've found out, it puts you out of the game until you can get it fixed up. Second, until you have read up on EVERYTHING, including prepping those stones, don't proceed. In your case, send your razor out to get it fixed up. It might just be the lighting but it looks like there is a frown developing. In any case, you don't want to make it worse. Then get another clunker to try your hand at honing......after you've read up on it some.

I would say it will be impossible to diagnose the issue because you don't have the experience to test the blade (shaving experience) or the experience to hone the blade so we couldn't know what, if anything, happened when you tried.

I would suggest having a razor professionally honed, and focus on shaving and stropping. Once you are comfortable with those two skills, you will have a way to assess your own honing.

All advise true, and if you accept you can move forward instead of backwards, until you know how to shave and strop , you really don't know what the edge is supposed to be right , maybe the edge was good but your technique wasn't ,, you never know m that is why you get one pro honed and learn to shave with it , letting the pros keep it going for you until you can tell the difference I. The edge, Good luck and honing one before you know tends to get the edge all out of whack. Tc

Starting with a pro honing is the best way to go. That said that stone can be used for a razor. From the pics you haven't lapped the stone, are using uneven strokes and the razor probably didn't have a complete bevel to start with and from experience setting a bevel on the 3k side of that stone will take a long time. Send it out and then use the 8k as a maintenance hone and start from there it will be a much easier learning curve and you will have your benchmark. Good luck

You've got the basic idea - hone it on the coarse side, then on the fine side until it's sharp.
The only problem is what happens if it doesn't get sharp enough and there are many things that could be the reason. The main culprits tend to be
- uneven strokes
- not enough strokes
- too many strokes
- too much pressure
- not enough pressure
- inadequate hone
- inadequate razor

As you can see, it's pretty hard to diagnose the case over the internet, but we try to do the best we can. Dovos are almost never bad, so that's unlikely. I don't have any idea about the hone, the grit labeling is in the ballpark of the hones most of us use (norton, naniwa, shapton) but that doesn't guarantee anything. It'd have been much better if you had picked a hone from these brands, but you can't change that now.

I do not see noticeable hone wear on the spine of the razor, so if you're not using tape to protect it I'd say you're not putting too much pressure or using too many strokes yet. If you're using tape I don't know - we then have to judge by your bevel which doesn't look very uniform but it's not terrible yet.

I think you would want to develop a way to evaluate your progress, at least that you are making progress and your razor is getting sharper. You can use your thumbpad test and a hair test, but you still have a bit of a chicken-egg problem as it takes experience. Get a pack of DE blades and check with those - if you shave with a DE razor you can use the blades after 0-1-2-3-4 shaves as benchmarks for different levels of sharpness, if not you can cut with them a piece of paper or run them over a cork to make them differently dull. Then you test with a hair and your thumbpad the difference between them and you should have some idea what sharper feels at that level. Hopefully you can then determine that your razor is making progress.

That's why we recommend that people get razor that is in a shave-ready state, as determined by a person who knows what that means. It is also much easier to maintain that state than getting there in the first place.

Definitely do some reading before proceeding. If you can find someone local to you all the better.

http://straightrazorpalace.com/memberlist.php?do=search

Use the link then type in your location in the field labeled "location", hopefully theres a mentor near.