Thread: Take two: Learning how to set bevel - again.

I doubt your king 1K is bad, everything I have read says they are good hones.

IF you are cutting hair off your arm you are probably there already. Can you pop hair off your arm all the way across the edge of the razor?

Originally Posted by MikkoK

Ok I have some progress. I went back to dmt 600 and did about 20 rolling x strokes and now i have good tnt and i can easily cut hair off my arm. Tpt is still negative. But i am starting to think that either my 1k king is bad or the use of pressure should not be advised in all the videos.

I will continue with light strokes on the 1k. If the edge goes bad i will fall back to the dmt and then jump straight to the 3k. I hope this works.

If you have set a bevel with the 600 grit dmt you should be able to clean up the edge with very little pressure on the 1k king. Might be an idea to go with just the weight of the razor on the king 1k if you're not in a rush to get a feel for it. Pressure can speed things up but if it's not being applied carefully it can ruin an edge quickly. I found I was torquing the edge into the stone a bit much at first, now when I do use pressure I concentrate more on the spine and things seems to even out better.

ok i might be on to something. I found out that if i go light on the 1k then the very edge turns little jagged under 60x scope but there is no reflection or white line at the very edge. This never happens when i try set bevel with pressure. I still have negative tpt but i think i am getting closer.

Also i have found that doing the away stroke is much harder to do with light pressure and good control.

Originally Posted by MikkoK

ok i might be on to something. I found out that if i go light on the 1k then the very edge turns little jagged under 60x scope but there is no reflection or white line at the very edge. This never happens when i try set bevel with pressure. I still have negative tpt but i think i am getting closer.

Also i have found that doing the away stroke is much harder to do with light pressure and good control.

Pressure is ok for initial bevel setting but I don't use pressure towards the end of the 1K at all. And I use the lightest pressure possible for other honing steps.

When you finish use the lightest slowest strokes you can.

My best advice is to not overthink or overcomplicate the bevel set too much. You just need to get those two sides meeting at a close enough point and move on to the next grit. Believe it or not, as long as you are within spitting distance on the 1K, the 4K can and will pick up the slack - I used to set bevels on the 4K, for example.

Think of honing a razor like creating a sculpture out of stone. Bevel setting is like roughing out the shape and removing the big chunks of rock - you want it close enough that you don't have to spend more time than you need on the finer detail, but you run the risk of breaking off important features if you go too far. You need to learn when to let each tool do its optimum job: bevel setter gets the edge close, 4K will get it closer and start the polishing, and then upwards from there for the finer detail.

James.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's always possible that the razor your trying so hard to bevel set might also give a honemeister that same trouble?
Maybe you are doing all the things needed to set the bevel on a razor that you should just put aside and maybe some one out there could send you a razor that would respond better to your learning curve.

I'm sorry as I don't have one, I have just a couple of what I would call good razors but i'm certain some on else might have one for you to work on.

IMHO, just a thought.


tinkersd

Ok now it is official. My 1k king is faulty somehow. It works fine on kitchen knives and crude honing, but for some reason it kills the very edge. I went back to the dmt 600 and did 20 light x-strokes on two different razors and both are now showing signs of bevel set. They both cut arm hair, pass tnt and are somewhat sticky on tpt. Good thing that i ordered the chosera 1k.

Does anybody have any idea what could be wrong with the 1k king? It has been lapped with the dmt and held in a water well.

Im sure most of us will have trouble believing its the stone thats bad. Maybe you should skip the 1k and compensate with a couple more strokes on the 3k.
If its the stone then skipping it should solve your problem.

Eric.

First of all - thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread.

Skipping 1k solved my problem. I honed with normal pressure on the dmt600 for 20 x-strokes. Tnt pass and it cuts arm hair (does not pop). Then I skipped the 1k and went on to the 3k naniwa ss. This time I was trying out a 4/8 heljestrand with uneven bevel wear and a slight warp. I just tried to get the whole edge so that on one side I was doing a slight rolling-x and on the other side a 45 degree heel forward stroke to get the middle which receives less pressure due to the warp/uneven spine. It has taken a lot of strokes because I want to be careful with the pressure this time, but this raxor is now almost bevel set. It is cutting hair easily and I have some grab in the TPT as well. The edge is a even and smooth under the 60x scope.

This thing has me completely bewildered. For the longest time I have believed that it was my poor technique that prevented me from setting the bevel. Now I am thinking that its a combination of few things: 1. some property of the 1k king dulls the very edge. (Maybe a lapping issue, although it is lapped) 2. I was trying to practice bevel setting with ebay specials. Not the easiest choice. 3. My technique was not good. But it was hard to improve since I never got to the bevel setting point.

I can't 100% say the stone is not the issue, but I haven't ever heard of a bad one "Yet"

But you have worked through the issue and have a system that works, I suggest you get comfortable setting the bevel and shaving those razors then when you feel confident in your skills add the King back into the system and see if it doesn't work for you..