A honing and shaving epiphany ......Finally
Tonight I took a Wester Bros Manganese steel that I got off of the bay for the princely sum of nine bucks shipped and honed it up. The razor is overall in good shape but the edge had some micro chipping and was as dull as they come.
I fooled with setting the bevel on a coticule with slurry and after 200 laps I decided to experiment with that another day and got my DMT 1200 and cleaned up the chips and set the bevel in short order.
I got on the Norton 4/8 doing an aggressive pyramid and went through that , The edge was getting there but not there yet so I did another aggressive pyramid. I took it into the bathroom and grabbed a hair out of my hairbrush to see if the thing would pass HHT. Nope. Stropped 50 and 50 and still no HHT but the edge was popping hairs off of my leg to beat the band.
Here is where the epiphany comes. I knew from the way the razor popped hair I would get a fine shave out of it. Then it occurred to me that the reason Randydance was always telling me to test shave off of the 8k was because if it needed to be sharper there was no point in going up in grit.
If it needed to be sharper I needed to go back down to the 4k......DUH ! :gaah: Took me a year to figure out what I was told here back in April of '08 and over and over for months since. Not a quick study. :shrug: I shaved and it was a good shave. The razor could be sharper and smoother so I will take it back to the 4/8 and tune it up a bit. Test shave and if it is good enough go to a higher grit and test shave again and go from there.
From the start of my honing I had a 4/8 and a Swaty and added a Shapton 15k soon after so I always went right to the finishers and never tried shaving off of the 8k except for once maybe a month ago again at Randy's suggestion. Got a good shave then but I still didn't get the point until tonight.