Thread: Honing specific to Stainless Steel

How is everyone? I was posting this thread, because I need to know how much more intensive work you need to do to get a stainless steel razor shave ready. Right now my Dovo is tugging on my stubble and I need to go back to the drawing board. Does anyone have any advice for me? Thanks.

will better if you post in honing section. hope Mod's will move thread to honing.
there is shouldn't be any special way to hone SS BLADE.
ONly some of them will not act as usual in final touch. in that case you may need different stones.
I finish most ss on CHARNLEY.F.
As you mention your blade was early shave ready then your easy option will be tr y barber hone or chro2 ,diamond pastes see will they help.
HOPE this helps

I've often wondered about this myself, though not having a SS razor I've never had to really get into it. But from my interests in knives and razors in general I would gather that the stainless will be more resistant to the abrasive qualities of the stone/hone/coticle requiring more passes than a carbon blade to achieve a similar result...

One thing I would try to impress on you is that when the guys around here say "LIGHT PRESSURE" they are so far from kidding it's kinda scary. See pushing down on the blade SEEMS like it would speed up the process but what I have noticed is it causes the blade to flex in a way that keeps the EDGE of the blade from being honed cleanly/evenly/properly however you'd like to put it.

My best guess and advice would be to take every bit of information you already know from your carbon blades and add that with everything you can possibly find to read about it, and then just assume it's going to take more time and more care than you think it should.

It's good to be back HELLO AGAIN SRP!!!

Honing stainless is really no different than honing carbon IMO, it may take just a tad longer but it should not be significant. If the razor just needs a touch up and not re honed I would suggest a few laps on a barbers hone as was suggested earlier.

Moved to honing

And I agree there is really no appreciable difference...

Sorry about that. I'm still getting used to navigating around this site. Thank you for your quick reply. What I'm working with is a Norton 4k/8k combo. My blade (1st straight) is a Dovo 5/8 fully hollow round tip Pearlex (beauty!) I don't think that it was shave ready out of the box, but it was pretty sharp. The only other thing I have is the no break-in Dovo linen/leather strop. Does it mess my edge up if I strop on the linen side daily?

Stropping on linen first and then leather before the shave is pretty routine for most shavers. Some, including me, do a few strokes on leather after the shave as well. Here is a 1961 barber manual excerpt from the SRP Wiki with some good honing info and also stropping stuff to go with in the last couple of pages.

I hone SS the same as CS, but there may be a better way out there that I don't know about (yet)...

What Lynn said about it here.