Thread: My Honing

Originally Posted by AFDavis11

I place the Norton on a folded towel for this part. The towel folded up as I stand over the entire affair will allow the hone and the blade, held flat against the hone to pivot and gimbal in response to any pressure mistakes I may make. Keeping the pressure light, the hone will move with me if I make any mistakes and the blade will always be maintained in a perfectly flat position on the hone.

As the bevel becomes more perfect and sharp I will transition to an X pattern ensuring the blade contact pressure becomes even less (at this point about the weight of the blade alone will work). I use the X pattern for a variety of reasons. I ensure that each stroke is the same angle, lenght, and with equal (and light) pressure. But there must be enough to hold the razor flat to the hone and actually do something to the razor. The fewer strokes the better.

OK....comments?

Sorry for the newb question, but what kind of strokes were you doing prior to transitioning to the X pattern? Heel leading, straight down the stone?

Yup! , I start with just heel leading if the bevel needs a lot of work.

Excellent... thank you!

One of the four razors I've sharpened so far is being a problem child, and I think I need to start over again from the beginning. I think my problem stems from doing straight passes down the sandpaper-on-marble without the heel leading. It appears that the bevel (and this is only on one side.. the other side is fine) starts out fairly wide at the heel, then gradually diminishes to almost non-existent at the tip. The back half of the blade (the half that ends at the heel) is very sharp. The front half.. well, not so much.

The things that strike me as weird about this... Only one side?? Hmm. Guess the blade isn't warped, then. OK, so it must be that the spine on that side is uneven. With the crude implements I have at my disposal, it looks even, but I can't think of anything else that would cause a bevel like this...Maybe doing the heel leading strokes will fix it... Think I'll go find out.

Its usually something pretty simple, like the spine geometry.

I really, really like the way you break the process into segments. In another thread I've been getting lots of great advice from Bart and Glen and many others and the concept of those stages was finally sinking in. This cements it rather well. I must say that I was very surprised to read the section where you use two hands and some pressure, but it makes sense, applied carefully. The part that blew me away was at the end where it's revealed that the whole process takes 15 minutes! I can spend that long just looking at the edge under my little microscope trying to figure out what's going wrong.

This thread really needs to be a sticky and the original post added to the Wiki. Just MO, of course.