No photos today but....
In the back of my mind, I've been grumbling over the apparent paradox regarding some razors respond better to some hones. In particular, the old Sheffield Steel razors and the Coticule.
For the life of me, I could not see how it would make a difference. The "Old Sheffield razors just can't hold the edge a synthetic hone can create" just didn't seem right. An edge is an edge is an edge, and it's 0 microns wide when done correctly.
I read lots about sharpening, wandering the net and finding tidbits here and there.... and I ran across Brent Beach's blog. It's an interesting blog, he's done a lot of research himself, having settled on abrasive film tech, but it should be pointed out that his work has been on woodworking edges, not razors.
I could not put my finger on it to start, but something somewhere in his blog was tickling my synapsys....
I went back and sure enough, I found it. It does not directly translate to razors in the fact that we do not use bench grinders (duh), but neither does Brent when he "grinds" blades, he simply uses either coarse abrasive film or a coarse hone. It was the grit size and it's effect on materials being abraded by it that was very interesting.
The page on his site that I'm talking about: http://goo.gl/TwYdj9
The interesting bit was that abrasives in the 1.0 microns and smaller had little adverse effect, but grit larger than 1 micron could cause structure damage much deeper than the scratch itself, so that even when the scratch was polished out by say a 1 micron abrasive, the damage was still there in the substrate!
Our old Shefield razors are typically heavier in grind than todays full hollow blades, and the Coticule hone with it's soccerball garnets makes a much shallower scratch pattern, than modern man made abrasives... perhaps the Coticule honing causes far less damage in the substrate of the edge than our agressive man made hones?!?!?
I don't know, nor do I think of my self as an expert on these matters. I'm just trying to make sense out of what we know from application of these hones on various types of razors.
Old razors can weigh heavily on the hones, most modern razors are full hollow and of much harder steels and less weight, so perhaps the grit does not scratch as deeply on newer razors as it does on the old heavy wedges?!?!?
Thoughts anyone?
Regards
Kaptain "Clueless" Zero