Thread: A newbie perspective on coticules

Thanks for sharing, Heir. It's not easy to say "I tried to do this because lots of guys said it would be easy to follow a procedure and I was unable to do it" - that takes courage.

BTW I've seen one of Heir's cotis, and it is certainly suitable for razors. In my opinion, asking if it's bad coti's is similar to asking if Heir was honing with his feet. I have never heard of "bad" coti's ending up in the "open market" and I've never heard of anyone honing with their feet (though there is the video of the guy who shaves with his feet).

Now, granted I don't know what everyone's experiences are, but looking at the responses, there seem to be two main catagories - A) New guys who counter Heir's experiences by saying coti's did work for them when they were new and B) Guys who have been around for a while saying they also don't think coti's are easy for new guys to learn on.

I think this trend is actually pretty widespread for exactly the same reason I thank Heir for posting this thread - it's not easy to admit you couldn't do something. I bet for every new guy who says they learned easily with coti's there are several for whom it did not work. I think there are highly skewed statistics presented if you "do your reading" on what works or doesn't for new guys.

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For what it's worth, I had a BBW and coti pretty early in my learning process, and my way of getting around my inability to really assess my edges at given stages and develop an "efficient" honing process was to always do more honing than I needed to. I didn't have to worry about wire edges and I wasn't doing so much honing as to remove massive amounts of steel - my philosophy was that it was better to do 50 or 100 extra strokes and know I'm definitely there than to end up with razors that won't shave. When I switched out my BBW/coti for the Naniwa 5k and 8k, my honing times were cut to about 1/4 (I timed large batches on both setups).

Not to say that the BBW or coti are bad hones - to me they are things to play with, not things to work with. It's also always good to have a plan B for razors that don't seem to behave under your plan A.