Thread: Close, but no cigar: consistently mediocre honing

Thanks again for the helpful replies! I now have three razors that will pass the HHT first try. On two of them, the hair really pops.
I had free time this weekend, so I relaxed and really focused in on what I was doing with honing. Looking through my cheapo pocket microscope, my bevel looked solid to me. So I figured that whatever I was doing wrong was starting sometime after the DMT 1200 stage, it's great for bevels.

Getting the King 4K water stone was a great idea, thanks. Not so much because it's 4K, but because it has tremendous feedback. As much as I like the DMTs, they have very little feedback to them, other than scraping. I reduced my number of strokes to between 20 - 40, went very slowly with very light pressure, and paid very close attention to my rolling X stroke. I slowly chased the little water wave evenly across the entire length of the blade during the length of the stroke, really getting the feel of the edge on the stone. And wham - I got a killer edge off the 4K. I could feel it on the stone. Very encouraging and helpful.

Then I tried to recreate the same feel up the progression on the DMT 8K, the Chinese, and the Shapton 16K - light pressure, low strokes, relaxed consistent strokes. I could feel a definite smooth drag or suction during the slow strokes I was doing when the edge was right at each stage, especially on the non-DMTs. I repeated this sequence with two other razors, and got the same result. The "suction drag" on the Shapton is particularly intense, the more polished the edge gets on a sharp razor.

The time I spent the past few days learning feedback on the simple 4K water stone was the single biggest help. I like my DMT 8000, but wonder if I missed the boat on "feel" by not starting out with a Norton 4/8 water stone. Really watching the stroke, really feeling the stroke, was the key. I think before I was using inconsistent strokes and pressure - trying to compensate for my lack of feel by doing hundreds of strokes, many of them probably bad strokes just canceling out the good ones.