Quote Originally Posted by Johnny J View Post
Can I keep going like this forever?
AFAIK you can go indefinitely assuming no chips or dings, but "indefinitely" doesn't equal "forever", it just means that we haven't been able to demonstrate a real upper limit.

I think you could probably go forever on a hardwood paddle. I've done my own experiments where I took a razor and stropped it over a thousand laps on a chrome-oxide board (poplar) and detected no rounding or ovalling - a single lap on a fine flat hone left hone marks all the way to the edge. It doesn't prove that you can do this forever though; but it does mean that the effort to push the experiment beyond this is greater than my continued curiosity :-)

I also think you could probably do it even on a leather-covered paddle. Though you will get some convexing the blade should only convex to a certain point and then stop. The big danger with a leather covered paddle (and I suspect the basis for the claim that paddles only get you so far before you need to hone) is that if you put pressure on the razor you can increase the rounding very quickly, and then subsequent normal (i.e. lighter) strokes won't hit the edge as readily; do this often enough and you'll probably need to hit a hone. This is easier to do if the paddle is heavily pasted, because there's more resistance to the blade's passage and hence more of a tendency to use more pressure yourself.

There's a thread in the stropping forum where a member maintained his razor with a weekly touch-up on a leather covered paddle and it went on like this for months without detectable degradation, until he finally got bored with the experiment and called it off. It's possible that he simply didn't carry the experiment far enough however - forever is a very long time after all, and boredom is understandable.

Probably the best evidence for this proposition was a member here a few months ago that had been maintaining his one razor for four years with a leather-covered paddle, and finally decided to get his razor honed because all the honing talk around here convinced him he needed it - despite the fact that by his own admission his razor was still shaving fine. So there's at least one experimental data point that four years of use is not too much for a paddle to handle, but it's only the one guy so who knows how generalizable his experience is.