Thread: Unable to achieve that last little bit of sharpness

Whether your intention is shaving or honing with "very light pressure", it's hard to go wrong with it.

My opinions only, based on my own experience, not according to anyone else:

1/If you insist on using any slurry at all, and I believe its net effect at any point is often negative, pull the edge through it, don't push. Pushing the blade into slurry dulls the tip while it's cutting the territory that doesn't matter, just behind the tip. If, as people say, running the edge over your relatively soft thumbnail ruins an edge, what do you think that constantly pushing it into a pile of rock is doing? Once the tip is rounded by that, at any stage, you've lost. I learned this decades ago, sharpening violin knives, and it holds just as well for razors. If you want to see it clearly, use a turntable Japanese honing station as lots of woodworkers do, where everything happens much faster than for manual razor honing: if you use slurry, the side of the edge forced into the slurry picks up a very visible rounding at the tip. Because I was looking for it, I quickly saw the same with razor honing on stones.

2/If C12K is the grey Chinese hone, lose it. I have two and am convinced that people have been led astray by its slowness into thinking it's a fine stone. By my measure, it's around 6000, according to the results it leaves. I bought one for my violin shop, and gave it away as a definite step backwards from my 30 year old 8000 Japanese water stone: I don't get why razor people are into it, except that it's cheap. Just buy a Naniwa 12K and be done with it.

3/For just a bit more moxie, at the end, before leather, "hone" your edge on a piece of clean, fresh glass, using it just as you would a stone, with a little water, then dry. For me this was the last step in getting an edge that approached a factory DE blade. I have been intending to start a discussion thread on this step, which I think is burnishing the edge into better order than leather will subsequently do, but will mention it now. Although I haven't mentioned this here, my violin friends are all reporting great results from this additional step.

Originally Posted by mdarnton

My opinions only, based on my own experience, not according to anyone else:

1/If you insist on using any slurry at all, and I believe its net effect at any point is often negative, pull the edge through it, don't push. Pushing the blade into slurry dulls the tip while it's cutting the territory that doesn't matter, just behind the tip. If, as people say, running the edge over your relatively soft thumbnail ruins an edge, what do you think that constantly pushing it into a pile of rock is doing? Once the tip is rounded by that, at any stage, you've lost. I learned this decades ago, sharpening violin knives, and it holds just as well for razors. If you want to see it clearly, use a turntable Japanese honing station as lots of woodworkers do, where everything happens much faster than for manual razor honing: if you use slurry, the side of the edge forced into the slurry picks up a very visible rounding at the tip. Because I was looking for it, I quickly saw the same with razor honing on stones.

I think perhaps you have created a self defeating attitude before you have learned enough about slurry and SR's therfore it will never work for you...Your Hypothisis is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.
If you want to actually learn about slurry and how it works the information is on here in many thousands of threads, you simply have to want to find it.. But to call it negative without learning how it actually works is just showing inexperience with Honing SR's and bias from working other tools...