I have an eBay special W&B razor that I am trying to bring up to an acceptable level of sharpness. I spent about 2-1/2 hours with it on my sharpening stones the other night with no success.

here is my problem: the toe of the razor (or really that half of the blade) does not get any significant contact with the stone to get it sharp. I can tell this with the sharpie test, the black does not get rubbed off with any strokes on my Norton 4k/8k hones without an unacceptable amount of pressure.

First of all, I have a Norton 220/1k and 4k/8k stones, and I have lapped them flat with some 320 & 600 grit paper on a granite surface plat (from Woodcraft), so I know the stones are as flat as they can possibly be.

I have tried honing the razor every way I can think of, including heel leading and toe leading, x-pattern, etc and without sort of lifting the spine slightly I cant get any real amount of contact at the toe end of the razor.

The spine shows a good amount of wear, but even that looks uneven.

I'm wondering if I should try to reset/flatten the spine of my razor using the 220 or 1000 hone to make sure that it is flat before trying to proceed any further in sharpening my razor.

This has been frustrating since the heel half of my razor is sharp already, passing the HHT and others, but I cant shave with half a razor