Thread: Stainless razor giving me trouble

Stainless steel is far more prone to forming burrs or wire edges than plain carbon steel - and they are considerably tougher to get rid of on stainless also, they can be very tenacious on some stainless alloys. If you raised one on both sides purposely, perhaps you didn't fully get rid of it.

I suspect perhaps he's following the Science of Sharp/Murray Carter method of honing. In both of those, you intentionally raise a burr at the edge:

https://scienceofsharp.wordpress.com...-razor-honing/

The burr is later removed during the stropping phase using pastes. I can't say if this is 'right' or 'wrong.' But I can say that it is a bad habit, and what it's doing is covering over poor honing technique with good to excellent stropping technique. Which I feel is detrimental, as you'll never learn to hone properly by intentionally raising a burr to later knock off with stropping or a higher grit hone. In fact there's a good possibility this can cause problems when you find a razor that really, really wants to keep it's burr.

I suggest dropping the pasted strop and coticule from the regimen to help sort things out. OP, if your hones are half decent you should be able to strop on linen & leather and shave from your 8K edge comfortably. I don't know about the 3 guys brand, I don't have them and haven't read anything about it from a source I would trust. But assuming that it's around the performance of Norton/Naniwa/Shapton/King you should be able to get a good shave off the 8K. If you can't, then you need to drop back to the 1K or 3K and try again.

Once you get a decent shave off that add the coticule, see what happens. Then you can add pastes and whatever other bells and whistles you want. But there's no point polishing an edge that won't shave at 8K, so that's a great mid point to stop and do a shave test.

Also see here:

http://straightrazorpalace.com/advan...ml#post1702758

There is the legitimate possibility that you HAD a good shaving edge off your coticule - then degraded it with the Chromox and Feox.

I shaved with the razor today and I can report success!

First of all- I want to thank all of the people who took time to respond. The solution for me was a combination of many of the pieces of advice given here.

Since this was my first stainless blade trying to hone I forgot that 1. All blades are a little different and vary with the speed they take an edge and 2. Patience is a virtue.

I went back to bevel set and spent nearly 3x as long on the king 1k as usual but I got it to pass my weird bevel test- gently drawing the edge over rough skin on the side of my forefinger sort of like I'm slicing lunch meat very thin. If I can feel it "bite" all along the blade the bevel is set. This seems to be more reliable for me than shaving arm hair.

I polished the edge on lapping film like I used to do when I first started honing. 6um, 3um, 1um then strop on my Tony Miller English bridle strop.

The resulting shave was a close 3 pass shave but a bit harsh like I remember. My coticule edges are much more comfortable but this edge certainly was SHARP!!

Now- should I try to mellow the edge or just let stropping mellow it as I use the razor?

I learned a lot through this process again many thanks to everyone for the suggestions. There certainly is a wealth of experience here!

Well now that you know it is sharp and has a good bevel you could certainly try to adjust that edge with either a ton of great stropping ora few water only passes on your coti.