Thread: Better of two lapping options

Originally Posted by BeardO

QUESTION: Would anyone care to comment further on shaving against the grain?

Do you guys do this regularly? Does it hurt? Should it hurt? Is the problem with my honing technique, shaving technique, or something else?

I do ATG every time I shave and there is no Irritation whatsoever for me. Good ATG pass is a function of good technique and sharp razor.
IMHO sharp razor is a bit more important that technique to have painless ATG.

Univeral Rule #1: Pressure = irritation, skin removal, nicks, weepers and razor burn.

Eliminate pressure and its consequences disappear with it.

You may find that reducing pressure forces more passes ATG, but if you are doing
them without pressure you should still avoid irritation of any kind.

Originally Posted by ace

Univeral Rule #1: Pressure = irritation, skin removal, nicks, weepers and razor burn.

Eliminate pressure and its consequences disappear with it.

You may find that reducing pressure forces more passes ATG, but if you are doing
them without pressure you should still avoid irritation of any kind.

After a few days of letting my face heal from the last ATG attempt, I tried again this weekend with lighter - MUCH lighter - pressure. This fixed the problem almost entirely. I did still end up with perhaps two or three nicks on my throat, which is always tough for me to shave. More importantly, however, the light shave did not irritate my skin, nor leave a million little bleeding spots.

ace, thank you, yet again, for your advice.

I tried another ATG shave this morning, which started out well. I decided to make a few, localized follow-up passes on some of the tough spots to get a more uniform result, and to test some of the other techniques from the wiki. During that process, I ended up irritating my neck. I think this was mostly due to attempting too many new things at the same time. Also, the grain on my neck goes East/West, radiating away from the centerline of my throat. I haven't quite figured out how to shave those low spots between my throat and the vertical muscles on the side of my neck.

Regardless, a lighter touch is what I needed and, from what I can tell, will yield a perfectly-smooth, irritation-free shave at some point in the future. Thanks, all; have a great week.

"Soilarch--I really enjoyed your response. It's like a little touch of Pirsig. I think Pirsig would have enjoyed this site."

Yes-Robert Pirsig's Phaedrus in Zen would love razors and honing/restoring, I think! Imagine the thinking process he would go through-remember the "gumption traps" in motorcycle maintenance" Honing has these.

Originally Posted by BeardO

While I'm loathe to disagree with a Senior Member, I'm inclined to believe that 'perfectly sharp' is also quantitative. I see and agree with your points about my closet and ancient Greek architecture, but it seems to me that we can measure the 'sharpness factor' of a razor's edge using bevel angles, coefficients of friction, and other such metrics. My inspection with the loupe and microscope reinforce this working hypothesis - for me, at least. Do you disagree?

Hi Beardo,

I'll chime in on this. With an exhaustive knowledge of a blade's metallurgy, encyclopedic knowledge of hones, and a scanning electron microscope at hand, not to mention the variables introduced by your lather, you could make a quantitative assessment about sharpness. But we don't really have that, and it wouldn't be the best use of the resources if we did (an SEM is pretty expensive to run). The best we can do is act on our own experience (or, better still, combine it with the experience of guys like Lynn and Glen) to match particular types of steel with particular types of hones. That way, we get the best edge we possibly can from the steel and hones we actually have in the house.

That best edge may not be the sharpest edge, it will be the edge that cuts hair but not skin. I've had one such gentle edge from another user's Asagi. I made a slip with that blade that should have cost me a lip, and it didn't break the skin at all. But it laid glorious waste to the whiskers in its path.

I learned from Glen that American steel is very hard and can therefore sustain an edge from a finer hone than can, say, a Sheffield blade. With that knowledge and a lot of tinkering, I finally got a Genco to sparkle. I'll repeat that procedure on a Case, and expect a similar result. If I repeated the same honing on my Sheffield wedge I'd get the same degree of keenness but the edge would probably not survive a single shave.

That sparkling Genco is a little bitey, though. Not as gentle as the Asagi-honed blade. My very best blade right now is an anonymous 6/8 whose steel plays really nicely with the hones I've got. I don't know if it's American, English, or German. I'm just having my own very good experiences with it. I still don't know if I've gotten its best edge possible, or sharpest edge possible. Time and personal opinion will tell.

Best wishes to you.