Thread: Hone of the Day

You can not polish an edge that… does not exist.

In the end all that matters is how bad you really want to learn how to hone (correctly), if you're serious about it and have half decent motor skills with some wits, all is well. I don't care if you touch up first or learn how t set bevels. If you're a DIY kinda guy, you'll want to do the entire thing eventually.

Good work Steve. I am impressed with how far you have come in such a relatively short time. Now is when the fun really takes off. Once you get not only the concept but know how to get "there" then you can move on to refining the process and a whole new world opens up that you didn't know existed.
Just beware the HAD at this point. Chasing the dragon can be fun but expensive.

A few Japanese NOS razors on the stones today, can't wait to give them a shave, I think it's going to be the Hayashi Diamond up first.

Scheön Burg frameback, beautifully re-scaled by Stefan aka mainaman, and touched up on Shapton Glass 8k HC, then finished handheld on a nice Nakayama iro hoard koppa from Alex Gilmore. The stone was from my trip to see him last year.

Picked up this Joseph Allen at an antique store a while back, had some rust and pitting but nothing too bad. Cleaned it up with some fine Trizact and cork belts, the cork are very gentle. Rescaled in black horn with a lead wedge. There was a decent sized chip about 1/3 way down the bevel from the toe. Set a clean bevel on my newly acquired 12x2x1 soft ark.

Honing by oil lamp. Soft and hard arks, homemade razor. Oil can is a Haws plant mister filled with pure neatsfoot oil, shoots a perfect line of oil down the stone.

On the hones today, a beautiful pair of Mappin & Webb dressed in wafer-thin Elephant Ivory.

I’m getting the new Le Grelot Fleur d’Acier blade up and running. I removed the old blade by removing the screw of course, and tapping the back of the heel with a wooden spoon - this would be the choil if it were a knife. Don’t try to pull one of these out, and twisting might break the blade.The new blade fit in fine at the heel but not the toe, so I cleaned the groove in the spine at the toe with a few passes of 320 grit sandpaper, et voilà.

Always use tape on the spine - if the blades are not the exact same width, as in one has a little more wear than the other, you’ll be regrinding the spine every time that you change blades. And the spine on these are typically not hardened steel.

The next part is pretty standard to me, the edge looked decent so my progression was Shapton Glass 4k HR, 8k HC, and JNat. I was rewarded with silent HHT in or out.

Working on these is an art, lol, wooden or copper mallets (a wooden spoon handle cushioning a small steel hammer works too) to drive the blade out of the frame filled with impacted …. ‘stuff’, penetrating oil and heat to get the screw out ….

Working a bit more on the ‘on and off’ project, a nice old Wosty frameback. I lost about a bevel width to small chips and in doing so straightened the edge a bit too much, so yesterday’s job was to make the edge profile closer to the spine profile. Mostly done, the heel could be sloped a bit more I think, but that’s just a few minutes work.

325 DMT, Chosera 600, Shapton Glass 2k HR, SG 6k HC, JNat finisher.