I have been doing some pro-bono honing for students and newbees recently, and received a package yesterday that had in it a couple of the dreaded ebay wonders. So I opened one of them and started doing an assessment. The scales were dirty, but fine, and the pins needed a little tightening so no big deal. The blade was a Torrey, and had that 10 year look to it. You know, the dark gray patina that needs to be removed before you want to touch it. There was excessive wear on the spine. The tip of the blade had remnants of a thumb notch, indicating part of it had been removed. There was visible signs of corosion near the tip that went into the bevel area, and the blade was very dull but showed the shiny line of possibly having been breadknifed to hide perhaps rust or chipping.

So, no big deal, I first applied Flitz to the blade and removed the tarnish. I hate working on dirty blades. Then I put a layer of tape on the spine to protect what was left of that area, and started honing on the 1k nani to set the bevel. After about 50 strokes I decided to switch to my DMT 1.2k to speed things up. 50 strokes later I moved to the DMT 325 and worked for almost 1/2 an hour when the edge started to appear. Once I had a consistant feel across the blade, not sharp but consistant, I moved back to the 1.2k DMT. The blade started to sharpen up and would actually cut hair, so I then moved to the 1k nani. 5 strokes later the blade was dull again. So back to the 1.2 k and 25 strokes later it was sharp again. Moved to the 3k again, and the same thing, 5 strokes and it was dull. I stayed on the 3k for 50 strokes and the blade started to get sharp again. At this point I decided to start a pyramid and went to the 5k nani and did 5 strokes. Yep... dull. Back to the 3k and 25 strokes later sharp. Back to 5k, 1 stroke this time - dull again.

I played with this thing for 3 hours, and finally came off the 3k nani, which by the way is equivalent to 4k, stroped 20 strokes on Crox and 50 strokes on strop, and will pass the HHT. This razor is far from ready to use though. I have never had a razor follow this kind of pattern before. I keep thinking that maybe it lost its temper, but ones I have seen like that don't act like this.

Does anyone have any idea what the heck is going on here?

Ray