Quote Originally Posted by roughkype View Post
Well, it's your thread to hog, after all.

You sound like a glutton for punishment. Honing is one thing, restoring is another. If you want to see if you're good at honing, quit messing with such difficult blades. If you have an extra shave-ready blade, just backtrack on it. Start at your 1k stone, reset the bevel, then go from there. If you find a microchip again there might be something bad in your hones.

I don't remember if anyone's asked--have you beveled all your hone edges?

Good luck.
I'm not worrying about whether I'm boring people here, Roughkype, because my sense is that nobody else is even reading it.

I'm not punishing myself at all. I like doing this stuff. I just wish the results were better. The Army Special is quite a dog. I considered bringing it to work and breadknifing it on the sidewalk out front. I've got quite a bit of warp to go through.

On the plus side:

I have all the stones I need.
I've read all the Wikis, watched all the videos.
I've chamfered all my stones.
I've lapped them prior to and post use.
I soak the crap out of them, except for the 8K and the 12K
My technique is getting better, but not good enough.
I haven't nicked my strop.
I haven't complained about my brand new shave ready razor.
I haven't cut myself shaving because the blade's so dull.

On the negative side:

My stropping sucks.
I get no draw on my SRD modular paddle.
I think my Diamond paste might be cubic zirconium.
I'm wearing band aids on two fingers from stone handling.
My right shoulder is starting to ache from all the strokes.
My wife is getting ****ed.

I could take any one of a number of blades I have that are shave ready
or reputed to be, one even done by the man hisself, and work on it. But I've chosen to go this way, and I ain't backing down. If I can't make a lesser blade shave ready, I'm certainly not going to do a "newbie" on a Hart Steel, W & B, or Henckels. For now, all I can do is imagine how nice it might be to shave with one of these instead of a Shavette loaded with a Feather blade. I have a bunch of Ebay specials on the way. Maybe one of them will have a straight blade and my technique will improve by the time they get here. That imagination motivates me.