[Mods feel free to move this to another sub-forum if it doesn't belong here.]

So my first self-honed, taped razor was the first razor I got. A German-made razor made for a local barber who got into the barber supply business. A "St. Paul & Minneapolis" "Stub" for Alfred J. Krank. It was a little chipped. Cleaned up with MAAS, etc. The blade's edge collapsed after one shave so the 2nd and 4th shaves were bad. Then I honed it past all chips, I thought I'd honed off all the semi-corroded "trash" steel but the blade's edge showed mysterious chipping after the 6th or 7th shave, which was a bad shave. So I go "what the heck?!" and decide to finally tape the spine and increase the total angle of the edge.

I'd honed about 7-8 blades by this point, depending on how you define it, so this wasn't new. Talking and learning under RandyDance helped me decide to tape the spines when ripping off lots of steel, like the initial chip-removal and bevel setting of eBay and others who need resurrecting. Since my little 4/8th square-tip Krank was acceptable for the first few shaves I thought I'd try to take it to a 3 layer taping, which I understand is fairly good considering the width of the blade at 4/8th.

I couldn't tell the difference in ease of shaving between the blade at tapeless vs. 3 layers of electrical. The blade gave satisfactory shaves for about as long as the other blade I'd honed and used until pulling. About a week and a half. Then I lightly lapped it (with the original tape-sleeve) 20 times on the finishing hone and it shaves real nice again.

So I think it's finally fixed and working. Anyway, it's my long-time project, got it in the holiday season of 2007 and now it's finally good enough for daily shaving. Darn, it was a long time coming, too. I didn't realize it had bad edge architecture until I'd used it more than five times or so. Yikes. I had no idea it could take so long to come to terms with my "local" razor!