Thread: Hone amount question.

My grandfather gave me his old Henckels and I am trying to hone it but am having a problem. The bevel looks good but wont cut hair well. I am using the 4000/8000 norton stone and it wont pass the HHT or cut arm hair well. On the HHT the hair slides down the blade instead of catching like my shave ready blade. Should I keep honing on the 4000 side to establish a new bevel or do I have to wait till I can get a 1000 grit stone to establish a new bevel?

at first welcome.
Please stop honing this razor.
You can buy from bay ugly razor's and learn how to hone at first. then you can hone this blade. Or send this one to someone who knows how to hone the blade.
The day you will have cheap nonsense ebay razor's and ask questions about them how to hone i promise rest of the people and i will help you how to hone.
gl

If you want I'll hone your razor free as long as you take care of shipping charges.

Post pictures of the razor.

If it's in nice condition, yes it is a bad, bad idea to learn to hone on it.

If it's a piece of crap with pitting everywhere and a ton of hone wear already, go nuts.


If you can't shave arm hair with the length of the blade, you need to reset the bevel. Most use 1k. 1k works as long as the spine is true, but if someone hand-sanded some rust off spine, or someone honed it really poorly on low grit stones before, the spine could have large areas of uneven wear. Fixing this, even on a 1k is slow... Hell, even my 600grit DMT takes a long time when spine-wear is bad. I'm considering picking up a DMT X for fixing the really bad ones, but I diverge.

Thumb-nail test will tell you if your spine is off. If there's slip ANYWHERE on the edge, that means that part of the edge is not getting honed, which means the spine is worn unevenly. This will take many, many hours to fix on a 4k.

Arm-hair shaving will tell you if the bevel is set. According to your post it isn't. This will take 20mins or so on 1k to fix. I'd guess 2+hrs on 4k. I would recommend grabbing a 8" F/VF (600/1200) DMT benchstone. ~$60, but nothing in the world will set bevels better than this combo as far as I'm concerned. You can probably get similar grit water stones for cheaper, but you'll need to lap them, and at that low grit, I'd expect they would wear rather fast and require relapping much more often than higher grit stones do... hence why I went with the DMT's.

Once bevel is set, another 30min-1hr on the nortons then a quick strop should get you to a shaving edge.


But as the previous poster said, if that razor is in good condition (or holds sentimental value) learning to hone on it is a bad idea... especially as you will be setting a bevel, which means you'll be removing a significant amount of metal, and there will be a lot of room for error.


edit: Oh yes, I forgot this forum has nice guys who'll do free hones for newbies. I recommend that... and while you're waiting, buy some stones, a crap razor off eBay and learn to hone. It's a very meditative process for me. I'll sit down and lose two hours just staring at the stones. Pretty soon I'll achieve nirvana and be able to hone razors with my mind.

I agree and was planning on spending a lot of time to do it correctly but if mainaman will hone it then that seems to be the better idea.