Thread: This May Be Sacrilege

I was honing a razor and found the heel was consistently lagging in progress while the center and toe portions of the blade were very quickly sharp. I reviewed the awesome nine part honing series and watched as David Polan (Heavydutysq135) checked his progress and noted the same thing, the heel was slower to shape up than the toe. At one point he even commented that the heel spends less time on the stone than the rest of the blade. Well, of course it does. If you use an X-pattern on a stone the proximal portion of the razor must spend less time on the stone. You are almost immediatly dragging the proximal third of the blade off the hone surface. At the same time, the distal two thirds of the edge are immediately brought onto and then never break contact with the surface of the hone. It seems clear (to me) that if you modify the stroke across the stone from an X to a parallelogram, your edge will progress at a more uniform rate:

I did this and my razor shaped up in six laps on the 1k Shapton. I can feel the flames lapping at my feet already. In fact, I feel a bit nauseous writing this. Be that as it may, I am proposing that one can easily whet the entire edge of a razor simultaneously. The X pattern is not only unnecessary but actually deleterious to the whetting process.

I stand by, ready to be eviscerated.