I took my ceramic hones, and pattern lapped them with my diamond plate. On the Spyderco Medium (brown) and fine (white) hones, I used the 400 grit side of my diamond plate. On the Spyderco Ultra Fine hone, I used the 600 grit side of the diamond plate.

I lapped a criss cross pattern into all three hones, 45 degrees off each side of the long axis. A only did a few strokes in each of these directions.

Indeed, the cutting ability of the ceramic hones was improved dramatically. Dramatically.

Now the question really is, what the hell is going on with these hones? The scratch patterns I put into the face of the ceramic hones are visible to the naked eye, so the individual striations can't be much closer than 100 micrometers apart. That's a huge distance compared to the size of the sintered alumina particles of the ceramic material.

I think what this did was to make deep ditches where the honing debris can collect, leaving the remaining ceramic surface clean to remove steel. What makes me think this is that my hones feel all the time now, like they did for the first few laps right after cleaning them with scouring powder.

But still, what puzzles me about this idea is that I had the same depth of scratches before criss-cross lapping the hones, only the lapping scratches would have been along the long axis of the hone only.

There's more going on here than meets the eye.

Anyway, I had moved the bevel back behind a couple of dings I had put in the edge with the scales of the razor, and after criss-cross lapping my ceramic hones, the scratch marks on the razor bevel from the 600 grit diamond plate came off with ease. Prior to the criss-cross lapping, I could make hundreds of laps on my ceramic hones with hardly any effect at all on the razor.

Next weekend, the shave will tell a more complete story. But, the microscope results look better than the last time.

Is what I've done to these ceramic hones what may be termed dressing them?