I'm not sure how or when it happened
But today i appear to be able to hone.
I'm not saying that i'm a honemiester or experienced or particularly efficient, or the next greatest thing in honing. All i know is i sat down at 5pm with 3 razors in various stages of sharpness from "not" to "only just shaves" determined to get a good shaving edge and at 11 i have 3 razors that have passed TPT, HHT (with chest and head hair, don't ask) and shaves with out tug or drag.
Here's what happened.
I think leaving something for a while and coming back to it can be beneficial, in my case i went to the rig for 10 days. I've been honing for a month or so, with the help of some of the guys on the forum walking me thru my baby steps, and i'd got to the above mentioned "only just shaves" but none of my razors HHT'd (maybe once but i think that was luck). just couldn't seem to push it over the edge to shave ready.
I realise HHT is a party trick but in my case it's useful, no razor i have that doesn't pass the HHT doesn't shave without tugging.
While i was at the rig, i thought and thought and thought and came up with a plan.
I'd already discovered that i prefer to set bevels with a 220, tape and pressure. I give it enough laps to get rid of chips, bring up a little fresh metal and move up to a 1k where i do enough work to smooth out the 220 work.
after this i went with pyramid honing and i just never got there, as much as i tried.
I remembered while in my bunk something i read on a custom makers site about the pyramid method and how he didn't like it. How being able to recognise when enough work was done on a grit levell without going back and forth.
So i aimed to do the following. Work on a grit stage until the marks left behind by the previous stage had gone and the edge was straight and even
So i went to work, set the bevel checking, every 5 laps with the loupe to see where i was. i noticed that the scrathces from a previous stage would be deeper and darker than the current stages scratches, and when these had gone, the bevel was a uniform colour and edge smooth, I'd be ready to go up. This was all in conjunction with MMT, TNT, and TPT where applicable
for the first time ever, i got the razor shaving arm hair off the 1k. i moved up doing what i described removing the tape at the 4k, and going for light as possible on the 8k. when i checked with the loupe and it seemed like i was there, i went to TPT. i got the result that i feel on my shave ready razors, so i took it to the bathroom, 20 laps on linen 50 on latigo and tried an HHT. popped hair first time with every razor. after this i did 20 laps on the naninwa 12k and a further set of linen and latigo.
I did one stage with all 3 razors at the same time so i could compare, was good to have a baseline. that way i could deal with inconsistencies and get all three in the same conditon. i checked constantly with the loupe so that i did the minimum amount of strokes to get where i needed to be.
Now, they may need a little bit more smoothing out but i got to a point i have NEVER got to before.
By the way, my Grelot is very nice honed up :)
ok, so there we go, now this disclaimer.
This worked for me, I am not disparaging the pyramid method, or saying i know better than the many many more experienced, and better honers and honemeisters on the site, I just mean that i found something else that works for me personally. and to be honest, I'm glad, because at the end of the day all i really want to do is to be able to hone my own razors :)
Cheers Guys