Thread: Uneven bevel- how would you approach this?

Hi folks- I have this nice W. Greaves & Sons double notch. The bevel on the other side (not pictured) is pretty even, tho about 2mm. The side pictured the bevel goes from 2mm to 3 mm in the middle. The razor does not cut arm hair. It is pretty close to a wedge & I'm guessing no tape was used to achieve these bevels.

How should I approach this? I have a DMT 1200, Norton 4k/8k, and a Naniwa 12k. Try a 4k/8k pyramid without tape and see how it goes? Or would some other progression be needed with these large bevels?

thanks

Joe

Funny, I was just thinking how to fix an uneven bevel too. However, mine is not that bad and almost not perceptible. I was just reading in Lynn's guide on honing about doing circles or 45 degree strokes. IDK I am too new at this to make any suggestions but would like to read the comments.

The short fix is to try some tape. The relative size of the bevel being large would make honing go faster. Make sure ou spend more time setting the bevel on the heal and the toe and spend minimum time on the center of the blade to avoid anymore spine wear, tape will help here too. Most likely you can get a great shave regardless of the uneven wear.

The best fix if it is a wedge or close to it would be to have it reground making the bevel smaller and much easier to hone.

you can attempt to even the spine but that is a lot of work and not worth it IMO.
Old razors like that most often than not have uneven grinds and/or were improperly honed.
Reset the bevel and hone if done right it should shave great.

It is hard to tell from the photo where the razor is exactly. IMO you should put it in a drawer and forget you have it. Learn to hone on lesser challenges and come back to it in 6 months, after you've got more knowledge and confidence in your ability. Alternatively you could send it out to a pro but I don't know that the amount you'd have to pay would be worth it, considering the razor wouldn't be worth the cost due to overall condition. Lynn and I have talked about this type of thing a bunch and it is one of those things where correcting the relationship between spine and edge requires a lot of work and removing a lot of metal at the spine. You end up with a decent shaving razor, if you do it right, but cosmetically it looks ugly. Here, an excerpt from the SRP Library, Lynn Abrams on Honing ;

More On Bevel Setting And Honing A Wedge

The biggest problem with wedges is that most have been unevenly honed and you have different or heavy wear on the spine which in turn can be in different places along the spine on both sides of the razor. This wear is generally reflected in the bevels of the razors as well. The absolute key is to remove the necessary amount of metal with either a 220K or a 1K to get the razor sitting as flat as it can on the hone barring any warping of the blade. This is generally a TON of work. Once you get there and set a good bevel at the 1K level, the pyramid will work for the 4K/8K or the circle method on the 4K/8K will work followed by whatever amount of strokes your finishing stone requires.

When I first started with just the Norton 4K/8K, you could accomplish bevel setting with the pyramid method, but you were starting with at least 25 to 50 strokes and many times had to repeat the pyramid. It was most time consuming and laborious. The current methodologies work much better in my opinion and are much more consistent once the bevel is set.

If you have to remove a lot of steel, you can consider more abrasive stones like the DMT's here. Once thing to remember here is that if you use tape on these razors and especially if they have really unevenly honed spines, you will continue to end up with really uneven bevels. I do tape spines when I need to remove a lot of steel from an edge for chip and ding repair, but this is not what we are talking about here.

This is also something you should consider when purchasing a restored wedge razor. If it has not been re-ground, the previous improper honing, will come out with the first few strokes on the hone and although the razor looks great to start with, before it will be shave ready in most cases, you will end up seeing a lot of shiny hone wear.

That would be a challenge, and would require quite a bit of work, two layer's of tape probably. I'd just re set the bevel. Don't worry about how it looks.

is this what typically happens to a smiling spine/edge that isn't honed with a rolling motion? it kind of looks like that to me, but i don't have enough smiling bevel resets to be sure... it looks like the honing only touched the middle parts of the blade..