What we have here is a pain in the

I have a nice looking razor that I re scaled. It is a German razor with the The blade marked Luna Deluxe and a German eagle on each side. The tang is marked Emond B & BS Co. Ltd. Ottawa.
I have more than a dozen razors and have sharpened all of them to shave ready but this one will not. It is really hard metal. I have gone to medium to fine to extra fine to a Franz Swaty smooth finishing stone four times already and it feels really sharp to the touch and on the thumbnail but does not pass the HHT and will not shave well. Any suggestions? I am stumped ! Mack

Mack, once you pass the TNT don't use it again. It is an indication that the bevel is set but will not do a more refined edge any good. Just go to the bevel set and then up through the 4/8 level and strop and shave and don't worry about HHT.

I think, as David Polan says in his video series here, that most razors that guys are unable to get sharp turn out to have an inadequate bevel set so pay attention to that. I can't say that is what it is but it may be.

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Originally Posted by mackie

It is really hard metal. I have gone to medium to fine to extra fine to a Franz Swaty smooth finishing stone four times already and it feels really sharp to the touch and on the thumbnail but does not pass the HHT and will not shave well. Any suggestions? I am stumped ! Mack

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As Jimmy said , this most likely means you still have not established the bevel.
Going back to your bevel setting stone would probably solve the problem.
Do you have a scope or a loupe to inspect the bevel after each grit in your progression?

That is just the thing. I have a loupe and I have inspected the bevel and it is clean and even and the edge looks good. I can not see the edge so it is really thin and should shave but it tugs and pulls. I have stroped it a lot too and I am not rolling the edge. I even laid the strop flat and used it to make sure. It has me baffled. Maybe is is a throwback and just will not take an edge like a pakistan razor or something.

Mack Sometime in the bunch of the blade 1 blade come out which will act a little differently.
I will ask couple questions first.
what grind it is?
what stones do you have available.
Does blade has any color discoloration?
which progression you have used so far?
lets us know please.
for the moment leave it alone for couple hours.

Well as far as grind goes it is about a 3/4 hollow grind. I bought my stones used so I do not know the exact grit but aprox 400-1000-4000-6000-8000 and I use them in that order. I have even gone back to a coarse grit with this razor of about 200 grit. It is not that. I have sharpened many razors with no problem. Also there is no discoloration. It was a little rusty when I got it and without scales but not on the edge, Most all of the rust was in the center of the grind where the logo is. Again, I have no way of knowing the exact grit of the stones but I am pretty good at guessing that since I have about 15 plus about a dozen small ones that are about 1 x 3 that I don't use for razors.

Are these natural stones ? I remember seeing that nice coticule you picked up. If they are synthetics a photo might help someone ID them for you. Not saying you can't figure a progression out by checking out your results but I always like to have a more definite idea of what I'm honing with if possible.

Tried shaving with it again. No good. Had to resort to one of my seven day set. I will post pics of the stones when my wife gets the Christmas pics off the camera so I can use it. Thanks to you all for trying to help. I am not one to ever give up. I will work with this till I get it.Mack

I have honed one of these razors, German steel, blade face etched Luna...
I don't remember anything different about it, seems to me it took a rather good edge...

Just a suggestion, when you get stuck, first step away from it for an hour or two..

Then when you get back to the razor, change something up,
Examples:

Change grit for 10 laps, up or down
Add 1 layer of tape
Subtract 1 layer of tape
Change the stroke from an X to a straight or visa-versa
Do 5 back hone strokes
Do 5 laps with two hands and a touch of pressure
Strop the razor 50 laps

But change something in the dynamic...
See if that helps

You are right. I have not been taping the spine. I am going to do that and see what happens.

As a newbie to honing, I had a a problem razor whose bevel problem was revealed to me by some of the great advice here. Use black magic marker on the bevel, on each side of the blade. Then take 5 X strokes on your 8K or 6K stone on each side and look at the bevel. Is the black magic marker gone in a clean, crisp line at the bevel along the whole length of the working part of the razor? If not, reset the bevel on a 1k stone and try the marker trick again.

I found out that I had a much more bevel work to do on that razor of mine, and ended up with a great shaver once I fixed the bevel.

Already used the marker and it looked good. Sorry.

I just spent another hour honing the razor with no luck.
I then took another razor and honed it till it was shave ready, so it is not me. I just had to know if I had suddenly started doing something wrong somehow. I will take another fresh look at it in the morning. It must be something in the steel. Sure does have me confused.

I now know what the trouble is. I looked at the razor under very high magnification and the steel is porous. Little pin holes in it and all through the blade and the edge is not smooth. Invisible to the naked eye and even under 10x magnification. I checked several of the other razors I have and they are not like that. I guess I will just Keep it as a collector.

That is the first thing I check when I get a vintage razor. That corrosion/pitting at the bevel can look like swiss cheese when you get to bevel setting. Holes and micro chips come as you remove metal and unless you can get past it to clean steel it will never be a good shaver. I look at that first so that I don't end up wasting time on a worthless blade. Better luck next time.

Actually porousity is not caused by rust or pitting. When the metal is heated and poured into bars or sheets, sometimes they get the metal too hot and it is like when oatmeal is cooking. little bubbles come to the surface and then pop and leave craters. I used to be a jeweler and I saw this a lot in gold soldering joints. If the person were not experienced, they would heat the solder for too long and get it too hot and that would happen. In a casting it is sometimes microscopic. I do not know that much about it but if there are any blacksmiths here perhaps they could explain it better.

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Originally Posted by mackie

Actually porousity is not caused by rust or pitting. When the metal is heated and poured into bars or sheets, sometimes they get the metal too hot and it is like when oatmeal is cooking. little bubbles come to the surface and then pop and leave craters. I used to be a jeweler and I saw this a lot in gold soldering joints. If the person were not experienced, they would heat the solder for too long and get it too hot and that would happen. In a casting it is sometimes microscopic. I do not know that much about it but if there are any blacksmiths here perhaps they could explain it better.

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With regards to steel, these pores are called voids.

Try resetting the bevel. Hey, if it is a clunker ... what is there to lose, right ?

I have had this happen before and resetting the bevel worked ...

.. maybe I got lucky ...

I have re set the bevel many times and even tried taping the sping. No go. It is a nice looking one with german eagles on it so it will be a display mode. Still worth what I paid for it and the work I have in it.

I wished I would have seen this sooner, but you have nailed it. Congrats, as an earlier poster said(Jmmy) Always check the edge under magnification first. You are also correct about the origins of the porosity, I have seen perfect edges go to absolute crap when you try to shave. All too common with vintage razors, especially the Sheffields. You can probably still save it, but you will have to go to your lowest grit and stay there for a while until you get thru the porous metal.

Well here is a couple of pic. It will just be a collector

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mackie

Actually porousity is not caused by rust or pitting. When the metal is heated and poured into bars or sheets, sometimes they get the metal too hot and it is like when oatmeal is cooking. little bubbles come to the surface and then pop and leave craters. I used to be a jeweler and I saw this a lot in gold soldering joints. If the person were not experienced, they would heat the solder for too long and get it too hot and that would happen. In a casting it is sometimes microscopic. I do not know that much about it but if there are any blacksmiths here perhaps they could explain it better.

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Although this could be true, I am about 99.9% sure this was not the case on this razor, and the "voids" are caused by corrosion...

You might ask why???

Because the first pic shows me that the razor was honed and used in the past, in fact the razor was honed to an edge before it left the factory... Now over the years if this razor was no good, as in poor steel it would have most likely never made it to being used as much as the first pic shows it was...
The .01% doubt is from the possibility that all the honing wear came from the very first time, and they never got an edge on there, and never threw the razor away all this time...

This of course is JMHO from what I can see over the Internet, through pics, and if the razor were in my hand I might see it different...

Just a thought...

Now that I have seen a pic and I can see that it has been honed all the way into the shoulder, pitch it, if there is that much bad steel its not worth further effort. It also looks like it may have been a victim of cell rot.

I had a razor recently that went the same way as yours...just like yours, the edge was back into the shoulder, in fact, it went ALL the way.

I even went so far as to grind down the heel, so it wouldn't be an issue on the hones, but it still didn't help.

Nothing I did, and believe me I tried everything I could, would make it get an edge. Like yours, the bevel LOOKED good, but the TNT wouldn't work. I finally just pitched it.

No sense letting one bad piece of steel mess you up inside.