Today I shaved with an edge from my 1200-grit diamond hone. Ouch.

It wasn't on purpose. Last night I was honing up my Dubl Duck Special from rgdominguez, and I started as usual, taping the spine and working out the chips and corrosion to set a fresh bevel.

Usually, I leave the tape on until I'm finished honing, but this time I decided to take it off before going to the Belgians. I did a few strokes on the DMT sans tape to flatten out any difference in angle the tape might have caused. Then I did my usual blue/slurry, blue no slurry, coticule progression.

The shave this morning was dreadful. The razor was cleaning off stubble, but it felt really rough, like a steak knife, almost. I got through the first pass and then switched to the razor I'd been using earlier in the week. Ah, nice and smooth. Boy, did that rubbing alcohol sting.

Later I looked at the edge under my microscope--no wonder it was painful. I must not have done enough no-tape strokes to flatten the bevel out, because it didn't look like the Belgians had hit the edge at all--just the upper part of the bevel. I didn't see a double bevel, per se, but the edge clearly hadn't been polished.

One question that comes up a lot is whether taping the spine of a razor throws off the angle of the bevel, leading to problems later when rehoning without the tape.

With the Norton, my experience convinced me that taping the spine didn't make it harder to do touchups later without the tape. I think this may be because the Norton cuts quickly. Any slight difference in the angle is removed by a few strokes.

This doesn't seem to be the case with the DMT/Belgian hone progression that I'm using now. Before this latest experience, I'd done some experiments where I taped the spine on an eBay razor, then set the bevel as I usually do on my 1200-grit DMT. If I remove the tape at this stage, before going to the Belgian blue, the razor doesn't want to get sharp. Once I did several hundred strokes on the Belgian blue after removing the tape, and the razor didn't seem to get any sharper or smoother.

For you guys who are using the same setup, do you leave the edge taped? Have you had a similar experience?

Surprisingly, the 1200-grit edge didn't give me as much burn and irritation as I would have thought. It's about the same level I would get if I went a little overboard with a coticule edge. Don't look for me to ditch my Belgian blue anytime soon, though.

Josh