Pressure (or lack of) is truly important!
Hey all,
So last night I shaved and it went alright, but the razor wasn't quite as sharp as I would like and needed more work. So today I did a conservative pyramid on it with my norton, then did 50 laps with water on my hard coticule then 50 on my yellow/green escher.
I've gotten great shaves off self-honed razors but this time I paid extra attention to the amount of pressure I used and I tried to use litterally as little pressure as I possibly could. I made slow strokes and paid extra attention to keeping it LIGHT, almost lifting the razor to keep pressure at a minimum. I had no trouble with the honing and keeping the blade flat on the stone (even since I use narrow stones), but it did take longer than it normally would since I was trying to pay extra attention to the pressure.
Well before I did this mini honing/touch-up session I checked out the edge under 30x magnification and the scratch pattern was uniform and pretty good. Well after I did this honing session using as light as possible strokes, the scratch pattern was WAY smoother than I have EVER seen on a razor I've honed, even on a freshly honed razor with the same progression. I stropped it 30 times on linen and 100 times on leather and I was straining to see any sort of scratches at the 30x level, and it was significantly smoother than ever seen before. Very even bevel, and a very uniform scratch pattern. :y
The lesson is? USE LIGHT PRESSURE! I have yet to shave with this razor, but I can see first hand that using light pressure produces the smoothest results on the edge.
Just thought I would share this experience, especially to those that believe using no pressure is not usefull :D.