Hi All,

One of the most difficult things for me to learn as new straight razor honer was operationalizing the concept of "pressure". I watched a lot of videos and read a lot of posts - I kept hearing things like: "I'm applying a little bit of pressure here...", "I'm using little to no pressure on these X-strokes...", "This is just very light pressure.. enough to keep the razor flat on the hone...", "Too much pressure will flex the blade...", "Very light pressure here guys...". It's pretty hard to translate that into feelings in my hand and down to the blade across the hone. I have an intuitive understanding of it now but still struggle to explain it to anyone. I have a working idea to perhaps tackle this - so just spit-balling here but let me know what you think.

Let's make some early assumptions to get the conversation going - before digging into the details that could potentially make it happen. So let's assume I could build a device upon which we could place a hone. The device would be able to be zeroed like a scale with the hone on it perhaps loaded with slurry or water. The base of the device is or contains a pressure sensor and a digital readout - let's skip the math for now on pressure, force and area. Let's assume I could get some folks like Glenn, Jimmy and Lynn to volunteer to do some honing using the device and record their readings and a narrative about what they were doing (bevel set, touch up, 1K, 4K, 8K what type of hone the surface area of the hone, what type of razor etc etc.) - along with a completely subjective assessment of whether they are using light pressure, no pressure etc.

Then let's assume we can analyze the data paired with the narrative and come up with some equivalent analogous metrics for what light pressure, no-pressure, etc mean in terms people could recreate at home. So let's say we find that generally "light pressure" across several honers on a Norton 8K with a Dovo 5/8 full hollow equates to between 4 and 8psi (I'm totally making that up - I have absolutely no idea...) and that we search around the house and find that it generally takes between 4 and 8psi of pressure to click a mouse button or move a business card across clean glass with the tip of a pencil eraser. Things I can do at home to get a feel for how much 4 to 8psi actually is in terms of downward pressure without having to have the fancy device. Better yet - if we can find things to do with the spine of the straight razor that have an effect that can be seen when 4-8psi pressure is applied. Like lift the eraser end of 6inch long pencil by pressing the tip of the razor onto the sharpened tip of lead. We need consistent, repeatable results in order to start training muscle memory.

What if all that was possible? What do you think?

Adam