Thread: Wondering about grits!

Originally Posted by kaptain_zero

So, the bottom line is that if you have something, try it... if it doesn't work, try something else but keep the first product handy for a while... you never know, it might just work really well on the next new razor or perhaps at a different point in the process. I've just gone through the Shapton upgrade... nice hones and really fast cutters, but I'm discovering that my Coticule really does a fine job on polishing those ubersharp edges that I can generate with the Shaptons... I go to 16K on the Shapton but the 8-10k garnets in the Coticule still *improve* the edge afterwards for me. I get far better edges from my Coticule now than I used to before I got the Shaptons.

Regards

Christian

Kaptain, as a coticule honer who finishes on a Shapton 16K could you tell me about your use of the coticule after the 16K?

What a delicious thread again.
Trying to grasp physical reality when it comes to honing razors, is such futile activity. If it wasn't that much fun, I would have given up a long time ago. A coticule is such a great tool for massaging smoothness into an edge that it's almost supernatural. But when it comes to keenness, I always have the impression that it also massages something away from the crispness of an edge (above the typical 8K edge). I can only speculate that a Shapton 16K edge has enough "overhead" to exchange a little bit of that keenness for coticule induced smoothness. Maybe that would explain the Captains' premium results with that approach?

Bart.