Thread: Dinged my edge on my fingernail

Yesterday evening, while cleaning up from my shave and stropping, I ended up dinging my edge on my fingernail. I didn't see any marks, so I left the blade aside to dry overnight and thought no more of it. This morning, however, I went to put the razor back in its protective sleeve and it caught the light on the edge and I saw a weird reflection. To the naked eye you can't really see much, but when I looked at it under my x15 loupe, I can see the spot where I dinged it, which is not smooth and sharp like the rest of the edge and looks like a bit of a flattened part on the edge. Of course, this is right in the middle of the blade.

Can I fix this by touching it up on something, or do I need to go right back to resetting the bevel? The honing done on this blade is superb, so I'd rather not mess with it, but I'd imagine having that ding right in the middle will adversely affect the comfort of the shave.

You probably won't have to go back to the bevel. In fact, you won't. An 8K or at most a 4K will take care of that. Try 10 light strokes on your 8K, and see if that works.

Ok, so I finally got around to giving it 10 passes on my 8k, which got the little burrs off of the ding, but now there's the tiniest of chips there. You can't really see it without the loupe, but it's there. It's not even as deep as the bevel, but more in the very extreme of the edge. I wouldn't even know it was there unless I had the loupe, so I'm gonna test shave with it and see how it feels.

That's a good plan. Test shave first, re-evaluate, make decisions after thinking it through.

Which stones do you have? Unless you have Shapton GS's, 10 passes isn't much & even then I would go a minimum of 20-30x in effort to correct the edge.

I'm going to test it out, then maybe I'll give it another round on the 8k, or maybe the 4k first, then the 8k.