Thread: Barber honing advice - blade still dull

OK, I think I know what the problem MIGHT be. First, your hone is fine. I was worried it might be one of those little safety razor hones. Now, if you've been shaving for 3 years with only maintaining your razor with a strop, then it is likely that the bevel is rounded to a degree that the barber hone, which is a touch up stone for maintaining the edge and bevel, is not actually even reaching the very edge of the blade. If you had been maintaining the razor all along with the hone, you would have been fine, but I suspect that your razor now needs its bevel re-set

Originally Posted by Utopian

Now, if you've been shaving for 3 years with only maintaining your razor with a strop,

In case this is true then you are exceptional .
i would say go head make a little more strokes on your barber hone.
lets say add 15 strokes each time and check the edge not satisfied add 15 more and check again so on.
you may get the sharpness you like if not after 5 cycles stop it . send for honing.
hope this helps.

Well actually.... I send my blades out to a very reputable honer every few weeks. This one in particular came back really sharp, probably ~2 months or so ago, and I have a few razors in rotation so it's probably only seen maybe... 10 shaves? My beard is thick and coarse so it seems to dull them pretty fast.

OK, in THAT case, does the honer use tape?
If he tapes and you don't, then that also would cause the edge to not touch the hone.

He uses one layer of tape, so I did the same thing.

Maybe I do need some more strokes, like hi_bud_gl suggested. As far as stones go it does feel pretty dang smooth (although I'd be comparing to knife stones, not razor hones).

Again, thanks for all the help guys.

If 4-5 tries of 15 laps on the barber hone isn't enought, than you can try to add one more layer of tape, and do 10-20 very light laps. That will help if the razor is a bit more dull than it should. If this doesn't help either, than a good honing session is needed.

Finally had time to revisit this blade and try to get it sharp. The end result was it took a lot of laps to get the job done. I did 15 laps (same factors as before) and saw some improvement. Hit it with 20 more, a little better. Then 20 more. Then 20 more, and it was cutting the hairs off the back of my hand no problem.

So, great! A few laps on CrOx and everything should be great. Well, I think this may be part of the problem. I did 15 laps on my CrOx bench strop and the blade seemed to lose some sharpness. Now this is only an 8" x 2" srtop, so I didn't think 15 was too many passes by any means. Maybe the combination of CrOx on suede is just... more effective? I'm going to repeat the whole process and this time only do 5 laps on the CrOx strop before I shave with it and see how it does.

Interesting, I've never had a blade lose sharpness after using chrome ox, quite the opposite actually.

I only do maybe 10 laps, which seems to do the trick. It is possible to do too many laps with paste, to the point where the edge becomes very fragile and will crumble. Usually less is better with pastes.

Originally Posted by Ryan82

It is possible to do too many laps with paste, to the point where the edge becomes very fragile and will crumble. Usually less is better with pastes.

Maybe that's what's going on here. With the size of my strop I assumed 15 laps would be the equivelent to 10 on a larger strop, but I guess I was wrong.

I can't say for sure that's what happened. As far as pastes go chrome ox is relatively gentle, especially compared to diamond. But there are other factors as well, such as the medium to which it is applied....