Thread: A crazy idea - "Hot honing"!

Since metals expand as they heat, I was toying with the idea of heating the blade before honing it, with the expectation that when it cools, the new edge will contract and therefore become sharper.

Although I can get a good edge on a blade, I don't think I can get consistent enough a result to make this a fair test so I wondered if any honemeisters on here wanted to give this a go?

I was thinking the blade could just be slightly heated (say under a hot tap) so that it can still be handled without gloves, but feel free to try a wider range of temperatures if you're feeling brave!

Wouldn't the heat make the razor more sensitive and more prone to ware such as what you seen in a wire edge from over honing? Try it out, and see what happens to the edge over time.

I've been pondering the same idea but with stropping. I've noticed stropping a cold blade - about 10 degrees Celsius seems to get a smoother edge, but haven't really experimented properly.

alternatively, you could hone and strop at room temp, then put the razor in the freezer before you shave. Might be a little uncomfortable though...

Caspar approves.

Sounds like a lot of work to me, for minimal benefit.

If your razor shaves great now whats the point? If it doesn't better to increase your honing skills then rely on hocus-pocus to hone up your razor. Just my opinion.

There isn't any point really - I was just curious to see if it made a difference!

Originally Posted by rupert87

Since metals expand as they heat, I was toying with the idea of heating the blade before honing it, with the expectation that when it cools, the new edge will contract and therefore become sharper.

Although I can get a good edge on a blade, I don't think I can get consistent enough a result to make this a fair test so I wondered if any honemeisters on here wanted to give this a go?

I was thinking the blade could just be slightly heated (say under a hot tap) so that it can still be handled without gloves, but feel free to try a wider range of temperatures if you're feeling brave!

If you could get you rrazor to expand by 10% in length by heating, you could then hone it with a 10k hone, and when it contracted you would concievably get the same scratch pattern attainable by an 11K hone (i.e.- a 10% finer scratch pattern).

Getting your razor to expand by 10% may involve involve going through a phase where it glowed red, and then attaining the look of something painted by Dali. But as long as the shave is good, who'll notice?

It would be impossible to maintain even heating, as the edge would have higher surface area to mass ratio and therefore lose heat faster. This would result in the shape of your edge changing when you finished... I'm no expert but I'd expect this would happen


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I mean, if you wanna try on a crap razor, there's not much to lose.