Thread: How many classic barber hones do you have?

Originally Posted by Marshal

The glass hone is just fun to play with. It has a sort of textured/frosted honing surface meant to be used with soapstone pencil or a slate to make a slurry according to it's directions. The results I've gotten from it can mimic the slate stone, or if you do your final strokes on pure clean glass the edge gets extremely crisp and sharp - again giving my Kuromaku 12k a run for it's money.
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I have never heard of this style at least that I remember .

And I have a bunch of soapstone pencils.

Now I will have to research this more.

Where does this stop...........

I have more than a few . I truly do not know how many I have but back when I was actively experimenting with them my favorite was a Frictionite 00 and an Apart barber hone.

Funny (and great) how threads like this never seem to die. Just last night I was talking myself in and out of buying a barber hone of some sort: on the one hand, hard to imagine they are going to do much any of my other finishers don't already, so performance is a poor justification; but, on the other hand, damn they seem like a cool piece of history. Ultimately, aside from a Swaty 3 line, I wouldn't even know where to begin or what to look for. Maybe some day if I happen across something wonderful.

I would argue that while the end result is similar, getting there is definitely different. Doing a quick touch up on your finishing home, most users here recommend somewhere between 10 and 20 strokes on an 8 x 3 inch (20.3 x 7.6 cm) hone. On a 5 x 2 inch (12.7 x 5.1 cm) Swaty, I'd suggest 5 strokes, test, then do 5 more if not to your liking. For being so small, and able to create a polish matching or exceeding 8K, they are surprisingly aggressive. There's not much one could do with a Norton 4/8 combination stone that couldn't also be done on a Swaty. But the main reason my swaty lives in the bathroom is between it's compact size and the speed at which it can touch up a razor, the thing is just hard to beat. I can pop the B. Hone out and give a blade 4-5 licks far faster than I can retrieve and strop a backup razor.

Originally Posted by ppetresen

Funny (and great) how threads like this never seem to die. Just last night I was talking myself in and out of buying a barber hone of some sort: on the one hand, hard to imagine they are going to do much any of my other finishers don't already, so performance is a poor justification; but, on the other hand, damn they seem like a cool piece of history.

This is how I feel about barber hones, as well.

I recently picked up an SRD Comfort hone in great condition for a good price on the Bay. Have yet to use it.

Other than that, I have an Exide hone and a Carborundum 101 (I think). I've tried each of them once, although I keep telling myself that eventually I'll experiment with them.

I may give away the Carborundum....

I've had several 'Swaty' barber hones along with some others and they do work.

I'm one of those guys who if I were to drop and break say my Zulu, Escher, Coti etc and didn't have the funds to replace them I could live off of a Norton 8k edge for the rest of my life. With that said if I were to drop and break my Norton 4/8 I'd be eating bread and drinking water until I could save up to buy another one.

I'm expecting a 'Pike' Swaty in the mail today. I decided that since I can be out on a ride on my Harley for a couple of months in the summer that I needed something else besides my strop to make sure I could continue to enjoy shaves from a straight. At first I just took a DE, a brush and bowl with soap I prefer the straight shave experience much more.

Different Strokes For Different Folks.

That Pike Swaty landed safely today. While it was advertised as 'lapped' it wasn't up to what I would consider 'ready to use' so I used a pencil to make cross hatch marks and lapped it front and back on an Atoma 400. I will say that it was close but did need the work. I also rounded the edges which really needed the work (note; it seems that the Swaty hones did come with pretty square edges but I prefer a rounded edge--'Personal Preference').

After rinsing and drying well I warmed it and applied a heavy coat of petroleum jelly to it and wrapped it in aluminum foil and a rad and placed it back in a warm oven for about 10 minutes.

I have a razor that I refurbished for a friend's son that I need to test shave today but in a day or so I'll 'refresh' the edge on the razor I've decided to make my travel razor with the Swaty and see how it does.

Anyway here's a couple of pics. The first one is really close to the true color--the second one was in direct sunlight and that lightened up the color a lot.





Thanks for looking--

From my limited experience I dislike the results from trying to lap a barber hone.

In my experience lapping ruins them.

This has been covered quite a few times in other threads, but it's a bad idea to just flatten a barber hone without bringing it up to a pretty good polish, like is often done with Arks used for razor finishing. The synthetic barber hones are composed of a fairly coarse grit compared to the finest synth finishers of today, but most were subjected to flattening and polishing at the factory to produce a smoother surface that provides more comfortable shaving edges.

Randy has posted about this previously also. (He has a considerable amount of documentation from a large barber hone maker - American Hone Co.). I like to run mine up to about 1000 grit then hit them lightly on a cotton polishing buff.

The other thing you have to watch out for is degradation of the binder. These hones are meant to be HARD. They shouldn't give up any appreciable/visible particles or grit during honing. If they do, they are not of much use for finishing a razor. I have a few like this, they can be used for little else but mid-range sharpening now.

By the time I heard that lapping barber hones was such a bad idea I had already lapped and re-hydrated everything l Have listed on page 5 of this thread. The only ones that suffered any ill effects were the two craftsmen dual sided homes. They were already getting chalky and were pretty much unusable before lapping so it didn't make things much worse. All of the others came out of the lapping, re-hydrating, burnishing process in great shape. YMMV.