Thread: What might be going wrong?

I bought a razor off ebay, that was supposed to be shave ready. Thanks to JimR, I realized that it was not really, at least not as sharp as the one he honed for me. I decided that it would be a practice honing blade. So I took the edge to a glass bottle to dull it up so I could start from scratch. I have King water stones in 1K, 4K, and 8K. As I started to go, I notice that the heel is getting sharper than the toe is. I am at a point where the heel will remove arm hair with great easy, but the toe requires great pressure, if it will even take hair at all. I honed on the 1K and the 4K to get here. I figured I needed to go back to 1K, but I am not getting any better results. Any thoughts?

Sounds like you may be applying uneven pressure on the heel as you hone lifting the toe, keep the blade flat, use your X strokes and use little to NO pressure while honing. Let the stone do the work, you just drive the blade. I hope this helps. Best of luck!

+1 to nun2sharp. You can try honing with two hands, one holding the tang of the razor, and your other at the toe. When your hand is at the toe, don't use pressure. Just use your finger to keep the toe of the razor on the hone.

As a guideline, don't come off that 1K stone until every single part of that razor can shave arm/leg hair. Then move up in grit to your 4k.

Hope this helps a little bit. Good luck.

Originally Posted by nun2sharp

Sounds like you may be applying uneven pressure on the heel as you hone lifting the toe, keep the blade flat, use your X strokes and use little to NO pressure while honing. Let the stone do the work, you just drive the blade. I hope this helps. Best of luck!

+1


Also, try holding the hone in your hand, at least in the beginning. it helps give you an idea of precisely how much pressure you're actually using. If you're already using x-strokes, try doing more pronounced x-strokes.

And as Maxi stated, you should be cutting arm hairs by 1k all along the edge. Not necessarily clearing away hairs like you would expect a shave-ready edge to, but just cutting most of the hairs it passes over. if it is at least snagging hairs, then you're on the right track. if it's grazing over hairs all together, but scraping your skin, you've got more bevel work to do.

Since you've got unequal sharpness, i'd either go back to square one and dull on glass to even out so you know you're making equal progress and not repeating heel-only pressure - or simply working on the tip lightly only to catch it up.