Honing on glass

[mdarnton]

I spilled the beans in another thread, so I'm going to say more here.

I started one day thinking about finer and finer honing, chrome oxide, diamonds, etc., and remembered those old hones that double-edge people used to swear by in the days of carbon steel blades: concave glass and drinking glasses. I think we've all read the stories about keeping a DE carbon blade going for months by honing (burnishing? stropping?) in a drinking glass, so I started wondering how it would work on a carbon steel straight. I took a freshly honed straight (12k Naniwa, then chrome) that hadn't been stropped and a piece of glass and treated the glass just like an infinite-grit hone: some water, then some gentle rubbing as with a normal hone, followed up by more rubbing on the dry glass.

I thought the difference was pretty amazing. I think what it was doing was a harsher version of what the strop does: aligning, and perhaps burnishing, the edge, not cutting on it, and it seems to do an amazing job of that. My straight worked a lot better, and when I tried it on my violin making knives, which I have more experience with, the improvement was substantial. I posted it on a violin board, and to some friends, and they're reporting back that it works great on their knives. While I felt like my straights were just a bit short of a fresh DE blade, now they've approached that a lot closer, and I really like the way they're working.

When you think about it, if it worked well on carbon DE blades, there's no reason it wouldn't work well on straights.