A newbie's adventures with Shapton glass stones
I suppose this is a follow-on from my thread in the hones section here, where I ended up with a set of Shapton glass stones (2K, 4K, 8K, 16K). Using those and some 0.5 um diamond paste on felt, the end result is this, as seen through a cheap USB microscope:
http://i.imgur.com/07lHCOvh.png
That was done using Lynn's method for the Shapton GSs, which is a great instructional video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
I followed the number of strokes to the letter, although I had to replace the 1K stone and 0.5 um diamond paste with a 2K and 0.25 um paste, not having either of the former. Resulting shave off the 0.25 um paste gave a little bit of irritation, but was overall pretty good. Tomorrow I'll strop it properly and see how much smoother that feels. In the meantime, is there anything in the above picture that stands out as needing work, or should I just keep improving through repetition?
I have some questions about feedback though, I've noted three distinct feelings when honing. First is when I'm starting to hone and pushing the razor across the stone feels a bit rough. I assume that's exactly what it sounds like, the rough feeling is from metal being abraded off. After a while it transitions to a smoother feel, kinda glassy. I guess this means it's done and what people mean when they say that the glass stones practically shout at you when you're done on one grit. Is it?
Last feeling is a strange one, the best description I can give is that it's a kind of shaking, but smooth, like what happens if you try to drag something through water too fast and things start getting turbulent. I think it's either a technique flaw or some kind of really strong, localised stiction but I really don't know. So what is it?