Thread: Hone of the Day

A bit of a change of pace and direction today for me, instead of honing straight razors, I decided to give a few of my Henkels Pro series Chef knives a touch-up, I haven't long taken delivery of this very nice TSPROF sharpening system, having used a few different systems over the years I'm going to say this one is the best I've tried, made from aircraft-grade aluminium so well-engineered with great levels of adjustments and very exacting angles which is great for people like myself with OCD.

Nice looking sharpener.
Very tight bearing set up, and nice finish..

Quick touch up on the Green Escher with a misty slurry.

Lovely Escher , very much like mine . I have a light green Escher and light slurry gives me a mega smooth edge

Originally Posted by gary haywood

Lovely Escher , very much like mine . I have a light green Escher and light slurry gives me a mega smooth edge

Ive just started using Balistol in lieu of a light slurry, results are quite positive.

Chosera/Professional 1-5-10 onto a Nakayama with Kita slurry for a beautiful Haze /Kasumi finish

Had to correct for the 14.6° bevel angle with 3 layers of 700 3M bringing it to just at 16° that should hopefully fix the fast fading edge the owner sent it to me for..





Hone On !!!

Some comparisons on 2x Ishizuchi Aogami 2 knives.

L to R: Norton No.1 Washita, weird translucent Washita, Charnley, Idwal.

Put a final edge on one of the knives above with an old 'Turkish' this afternoon.



It's not desperately easy to get HHT on a kitchen knife whatever way you spin it, and there aren't many stones that will, while still leaving an edge that has some bite, and isn't overly thin or refined. But Turkish / Cretan stones are one of them:

https://youtu.be/RV-Ue8E162k

Going to give this a go later. The razor currently has a very nice Thuri edge on it, but I suspect it might be even improved by my pretty Mystery-Green-Blue-UK-Stone. (And if not - I'll put it on the translucent below after, because I *really* like the edge off that stone).

Here’s one that you don’t see too often, a Japanese aural razor, used by a barber to trim hair inside of the ear canal. I always wanted one but new ones in the states are expensive. They’re cheap in Japan but shipping kills you. But opportunity rewards the patient and I have a new one at a reasonable price.

The first attempt is not what I want and I’m unsure why, most likely I need to develop a different muscle memory. The edge looks good, bevel polished, edge straight and clean, and undercut on the hone is immense and stiction is felt. Yet it barely passes HHT and my first attempt at ‘hair sniping’ had a little pull. You don’t use these with lather of course.

The first thing that I did was measure the bevel angle. it’s 16.8 degrees and I put one layer of 1 mil Kapton on the omote (soft iron side) and none on the ura. On a razor this narrow, 0.290”, it boosted the angle by one degree so I’ve got 17.8 degrees more or less, the angle is different on each side.

Only the last 1” or so of these is sharpened. I began on a Shapton 4k HR, and quickly discovered that there was really no bevel on the ura side and the bevel on the omote had absolutely nothing to do with the spine, lol. There is also a little dip in the bevel on the omote though that worked out fine.

It took a while to get the bevels cut and set. Working with a blade that’s this narrow is interesting to say the least. For me it seems a two-handed affair, otherwise you can’t adequately control the torque and bias. And even then it’s not that easy. I progressed to the Shapton 8k HC and then to JNat. After the 8k and some palm stropping the edge showed ‘bevel set’ via HHT.

You won’t strop one of these on a hanging strop - I don’t think and I didn’t try. I used a piece of steerhide from an old CKTG magnetic strop system. Every time that I stropped it the edge was set back. I’m guessing that maybe I’m rolling the edge a tiny bit. Honing it is hard enough, stropping it is no easier, lol. I also tried 0.25 CBN on a balsa-backed linen that Scott Lockwood gave me, and it didn’t seem to make much difference HHT or performance wise.

So far, it will work well enough to fulfill it’s intended purpose but it isn’t where I want the edge to be. I’ll re-hone it tomorrow. I’m wondering if a stroke 90 degrees to what we normally use would work better? Like a push-pull stroke along the length of the edge. The razor is difficult to keep stable and such a stroke might help? Dunno, maybe I’ll find out soon.

If anyone has any advice on honing one of these, please post and TIA!