Thread: My first honing experience

Originally Posted by Hammett

Excuse me, but since I am not a native English speaker... What does DE and SE stand for? (dumb question I know...)



What should I do in the case hair does not pop up ? Continue honing? Revert to set bevel? This is actually what happens to me with the BBW



I already have several bald spots in my left arm and both legs :P

I have 2 Straight. One cheap that I bought from a local store and the other is a vintage Solingen.

I don´t want to screw the Solingen, so I learn with the cheap one

DE = double edge razor blade, SE= Single Edge razor blade such as a Gem.

I hone a razor until it pops hair. Some don't find this test useful but for me personally it indicates that the razor is shave ready or nearly so. As Lynn points out the shave is the true test.

Is your Solingen razor shave ready ? You might consider sending it out to a honemiester to make it so if it is not. This will give you something to shave with and something to compare your efforts to.

I have tryed all barts methods The yellow cuts faster than the blue i think there similar just one cuts quiker that being the yellow. I have shaved of the blue the shave was good and of the yellow a little better try it see what you think. you only start on on yellow with slurry if blade is realy dull to reset bevel hone and hone untill you can just shave arm or leg hair and your thumb grips the edge as you run along it and does'nt easily slide across with no grip.Then you can dilute down to water and then what i do is finish on 50 laps of water and strop and test see how it shaves. Then what i have done is 75 on blue dilute method then test shave of blue and then third shave do 50 on yellow water and test see what differance you can notice. I got good shave just of coti not sure if there was much differance of blue and yellow water it was hard to say but all three shaves were great then i added 20 laps on ch.5 and that added loads of glide. for touch ups i use bbw s then yellow water ch.5 or just yellow water chr.5.

Let's talk about slurry.

Belgian slurry ( I mean the abrasive milk raised on top of a BBW or a Coticule) contains garnets. Garnets look like this:


Garnets are very hard. Hard enough to scratch steel. A slurry is not only made of Ganets. It also contains water of course, and also a great deal of phylosilicates. Phylisilicates are minerals that are much softer than steel. They are what bonded the garnets together before they were abraded off the stone by rubbing with the slurry stone.
Small garnets can easily sink in the steel. Larger garnets can't sink so deep in the steel, because the honing pressure is more spread out over a wider surface area. Try scratching a table with a spoon. Now try the same with a fork (Don't send your wife or mother to me when you run into trouble over this important experiment) Back to the garnets: with the size of the segments that make the garnets being roughly the same, smaller garnets are less rounded than larger garnets. That makes smaller garnets more "spiky".
Conclusion: large garnets leave slightly wider but also more shallow scratches, while small garnets cut more aggressively and deeper.

Coticules contain a high concentration of small garnets: up to 40% of the entire volume of the rock.
BBWs contain a lower concentration of wider garnets: up to 25%

That makes BBW's slower than Coticules and if we are aiming for serious steel removal during the first stages of honing, the average Coticule will perform a great deal faster than any BBW. Hence, if the choice to do serious bevel correction is between Coticule and BBW, pick the Coticule.

Let' s talk some more about slurry.
The loose garnets in the slurry also abrade the very edge, while it plows through the fluid. The thicker the fluid, the higher the concentration of garnets (less water) and the more the thinest part of the edge deteriorates from the impact with the garnets. That is a dulling action. At the same time, the garnets remove steel from the bevel sides, which is a sharpening action. As long as the edge is not very sharp yet, the dulling effect is negligible, because the tip is not as fragile. When the edge becomes sharper, the tip becomes more fragile and more prone to "slurry deterioration". At a given point, there's a limit where the edge looses as much keenness as it gains. You could hone the razor into oblivion and not ever get a sharper edge than that limit. One of the advantages is that you'll never overhone a razor on a Belgian slurry. Not with normal pressure and regular razor honing methods, anyway.

At equal slurry thickness, a BBW with its lower concentration of less aggressive garnets, has a sharper limit than a Coticule.

Of course you could use thinner slurry on a Coticule, but for the inexperienced user it's still easier getting more keenness of a BBW with slurry than hitting the same level on a Coticule with thinner slurry. With experience it can be done, however, and the BBW becomes pretty redundant at that point.

When no slurry is used, but plain water instead, we get a different story. The garnets remain halfway or more embedded in the surface of the hone. A Coticule with its small garnets in higher concentration offers a very finely textured surface. The BBW, having more sparsely spread bigger garnets offers a less fine surface. Both hones become very slow. The BBW becomes so slow, that it seems to loose most of it's honing qualities. It almost behaves like a piece of marble. It seems to very slowly dull the edge rather than sharpening it any further. That's why I don't recommend diluting the slurry to plain water on a BBW.
But Coticules just keeps on going, albeit at an extremely slow rate.

No slurry, no slurry deterioration either.

Obviously the edge won't gain sharpness infinitely. As with any hone there still is a limit. That limit is defined by how deep the hone cuts into the steel. A hone that digs 0.5 micron into the steel will never define an edge thiner than those 0.5 micron. That's one good reason to use minimal pressure during the final stages of honing. Coticules on water are slow. They remove almost no steel with each honing stroke. For that they can define very sharp edges. But they are so slow that it takes ages to catch up if you weren't already at a very decent keenness when you decided to start working on water only.
A Coticule with water is a finishing hone. The majority of them can't be used to make up for much neglected keenness earlier on in the honing process.

Excuse me Hammett, for cluttering up your thread with all this theoretical wining.

Use a milk-like slurry on your Coticule. Don't allow the slurry to become much denser than that. Once you have a good bevel, that's sharp enough to shave arm hair, thin the slurry with an equal amount of water. Go on for about 100 laps. Again keep the consistency constant by adding a drop of water every now and then. You'll notice a big improvement in keenness, both in hair shaving abilities and at the TPT response. Next raise a thin slurry of about the same consistency on the BBW (err on the thin side). Do another 100 laps. Keep probing with the TPT, even if you don't really succeed in feeling the difference. It's there and in time your thumb will learn to read it.
Next rinse the razor and hones and finish with 100 laps on the Coticule with plain water. Keep probing with the TPT. My razors can pop a hanging hair at that point, but it must be a clean hair. Strop and shave.

Based on your shaving results, I'd say you did quite nice. I understand you feel in the dark a bit about some stages of your honing, but it just takes more experience to gain confidence in honing. It took me nearly 2 months of weekly frustration before I managed to successfully hone my first razor on about the same setup as yours.


Best regards,
Bart.

And that just about says it all!!!

Ray

OMFG

THAT is what I call an explanation. Everytime I read a post from you Bart, it's like meeting the master-of-the-universe-of-the-belgian-stones. I respectfully bow before you and your knowledge

Your explanation clarified loads of things for me and dark areas where I did not know what to do.

Many, many thanks!