A big breakthrough!

[HNSB]

Well, after honing for nearly six months I had a breakthrough over the weekend. I was able to take a swedish frameback with a heavy smile, and a blade profile that didn't match the spine profile, and get it into awesome shaving condition. I've had good success with a lot of blades, but getting there on one of these framebacks was a first.

What got me there? I got mad it it.
Normally I worry about being too aggressive on the hones, or getting a nice even stroke, blah blah blah.
This one really had me frustrated, so I ended up taking it to a lower grit and just made up my mind that I was going to get it to shave. I did rolling circles on it, without worrying about creating an uneven bevel.
When I stopped worrying about how even the bevel would turn out, I ended up with a nice even bevel all along the edge.
From there, some rolling x's going up the grits took it to a beautiful shaving edge.

So... I just wanted to share my excitement. I think I'm finally getting the hang of this.

[BladeRunner001]

That is great news...congratulations on your success

[RobertH]

Good for you, I need to find time to begin my honing learning process as well. I want to be able to put a good edge on my own razors, and so far have only been able to get them to shave arm hairs, but not shave faces nicely. I've got a Gold Dollar that I'm going to just keep purposefully dulling on the bottom of a glass bottle and honing over and over again until I get my form and technique down. Then I can apply that learning to the razors I want to sharpen. It will take awhile I think, muscle memory learning seems to be slow for me, so I think it will take awhile to get my strokes correct, nevermind the ability to recognize when to drop down in grits, when bevels are right, what stage in the pyramid to start at, how many strokes and what kind of finishing method I want to use, etc.. etc...

[HNSB]

I had a lot of trouble with the muscle memory at first as well Robert.
Two things helped me with that:
1. Remember to keep your elbow up.
2. Get a dull wedge and start trying to set the bevel with a 4k. Go slow at first and watch the water move. (Continuing to rework your GD will probably work too) I spent several days just dragging that wedge over the stone until I got a feel for it. I didn't really accomplish anything on the blade, but I did develop my honing stroke real well.

[cyclelu]

Congratulations!

I have gotten really aggressive with a couple of razors and the shave with those razors has been fantastic! Not quite the edge of the honemeister but very smooth and able to provide BBS.

[randydance062449]

Persistence is usually required! Well done!

[Stubear]

Nice job! I've found a bit of aggression in the bevel setting stage can really make things come together well later on..! Giving some of those heavy wedges some welly has worked very well for me.

I'm currently working on a triplet set of English razors and all of them have uneven bevels and apparently are made of some superhard alien metal, plus they are all truly in butterknife condition at the moment. You literally cannot cut yourself with them, and you cant cut paper even by sawing away at it.

I've started them out with three layers of tape on the spine on the 325 DMT and I'm working to get pre-bevels set on all of them. Then I'll move down to one layer and go from there, but I'm definately being pretty aggressive with them and I'm hoping that I'll be able to report the same success you've achieved..!

Great job on getting that razor tamed!

[RobertH]

What I haven't yet found, and maybe someone here can enlighten me about is how to know when your bevel is set and you're ready to move away from the course stone to the 4k/8k or whatever higher stones you're using. I have a cheapo microscope, what exactly should I be looking for to know that I've done it properly and I'm ready to move on to the pyramid stage?