Thread: Barber hone coaching wanted

Originally Posted by mparker762

Make sure the swaty is lapped, and chamfer the edges.

what do you lap it with? 1000 grit sandpaper?

That would probably work too. I generally use 600 grit. you can also use another barber hone.

Barber hones are very hard, so this isn't like lapping a norton.

My Swaty needed a lot of smoothing when I bought it, so I lapped it with 400-grit sandpaper, then polished it with something higher grit. The surface is so smooth it feels like glazed ceramic almost.

The lithide is smoother after I lapped it on my Norton 4K. The sandpaper left it feeling rough, like 220 grit, even though it probably wouldn't affect the cutting speed.

All of my hones have been lapped to death: on sandpaper and against each other in different combinations.

I'm playing around with the lithide today. It's definitely a fun hone because it's so small...

Josh

Josh... This is a great posting...

Right after I started using a straight I got a Premier hone from Tilly. About once a month I gave my straights about 5-6 passes and they came right back to great shaving edge. I thought that getting a Norton 4/8K stone would be even better. Wrong!!! All I have managed to do is screw up the edges and make them unshaveable. I have lapped both stones and they are ultra smooth so that is not the problem. Now I know that is my fault for not having a good honing skill, but the same technique is used on both stones. My patience with the Norton is about gone and I am ready to toss it, send the straights out for a proper honing, and go back to using the Premier barber hone only. They are very slow cutters and I am not likely to ruin an edge like a Norton. My only goal is to get a good shave.

IMHO, barber hones and swatys get a ...

All right, so tomorrow I'm going to do my first barber hone test shave.

I have this big W&b quarter hollow that I've been working on for the last week, so I thought I'd make it my guinea pig. I set the bevel with water stones--a 1K and my 4K Chinese slipstone--because I'm not a glutton for punishment.

After establishing the bevel I worked it for a while on my cushion hone from Tilly. I like the way this thing works; seems to cut pretty quickly for a barber hone. I was able to get HHT-sharp along most of the blade. (The heel and toe don't sit flat on the stone for some reason. It requires some interesting gymnastics during the stroke...) The edge seemed to handle hanging hairs a bit better than my edges usually do coming off of the Norton 4K. Not sure right now what this means...

I moved to the Gem for maybe 50 to 100 strokes and saw some improvement. I then tried about 20 strokes on the lithide, but I wasn't having much luck. So I grabbed my Swaty and did about 30 or 40 strokes. The razor is now cutting hairs all along the blade, but not quite as well as it does off the Norton 8K.

I'm a little worried about the test for a couple of reasons: The bevel doesn't look very polished. I can see the grit lines without a microscope. And second, I've found that a razor has to pass the HHT brilliantly to be comfortable for me. (A HHT razor won't always shave me well, but a non-HHT sharp razor is guaranteed not to.)

I'm hoping that the grit lines are more pronounced but shallower, and that it'll still shave smoothly.

I had the most success by using just the edge of the hones, which I've rounded off. This is a really heavy grind, though, and I wouldn't try that on a full-hollow.

I'll let you know how it goes...

Josh

The test shave this morning went OK but not great--about what I expected. The shave with the edge from my Swaty was equivalent to what I would get off the 8K Norton. It shaves, but not particularly close or smooth. (Right now the only way for me to get a really close, comfortable shave is to go to my paddle pasted and .5 micron diamond paste.)

I could feel my face starting to get raw partway through the first pass, so I decided not to be a hero and grabbed my paste-sharpened Henkels.

I was using the Swaty dry. I think I'm going to go back to the Gem and try to smooth the edge out some more and then use the Swaty with lather.

On a somewhat unrelated note, it's hard to understand why I can't seem to get an 8K edge to give me a smooth shave. Part of it is probably shaving technique, but I can take the same 8K edge that leaves me feeling a little sore, give it 20 passes on the .5 micron, and get a great shave. Would any of you true honemeisters be willing to finish one of my razors with a nice 8K edge so I could check my Norton honing technique? (Should only be a five minute job...)

I probably need more work finishing the edge on the 8K. Maybe that'll be my next goal...

Thanks,
Josh

I like the Barber's hones and have 4 - ranging frome coarse to fine, they are:

little devil (coarse)
cushion strop (medium)
Gem (med-fine)
amalgamite (fine)
lithide (very fine)

The first two are very fast cutters and set a bevel very quickly.

The amalgamite is a nice hone and I think I could get a razor shaving sharp off of it.

The lithide is one I'm still playing with - I've used it dry to refresh edges with good results, but some razors seem to like it better than others. I'm going to experiment with using it wet to see how that works.

Using nothing but these hones, I have brought a NOS razor to shaving sharp with not too much work. Sometimes I set the hones on a block and use them that way instead of holding them in my hand.

One thing I notice with the barber's hones is that you can easily underhone the tip and heel - so I periodically do a few laps where I just hone the heel and then do the same with the tip.

I lapped all of my barber's hones with a 600 DMT diamond hone.

The lithide definitely felt a little rougher and there are some scratches, but it seems to work ok.

Originally Posted by azjoe

A member we haven't seen around for quite a while (Hal Wilson) was a great proponent of them... he is truly a barber hone addict. He mentions [in this post] viewing the The Lost Art of Straight Razor Shaving by Greg Ives as inspirational. I've never watched the video, but you might give it a shot. There was a fair amount of discussion about barber hones a long while ago... but my aging memory can't remember whether it was on this site or the Yahoo SRP... might even have been in the Yahoo SRP archives.

Anyway, I have a barber hone but use it infrequently. I never used it enough to say I really mastered it. But when I've been lazy and let my rotation get down to the last sharp razor, and that one gets uncomfortable part way thru the shave, a couple light strokes on the barber hone and a quick strop allows me to finish the shave... quick and easy. Hal might disagree, but for me the barber hone will never match the edge I can set with a 4/8K Norton followed by croxide (or diamond) on a leather bench hone.

All that said... anyone know whatever happened to Hal... he hasn't checked in here since last Fall?

Hal is on vacation in the Himalayas right now I think. Talked to him last right before Christmas. He was pretty busy this last fall so he wasn't to chatty.

I have been reading some of these posts about how rough they are and not to bother using barber hones. Both Hal and Dave Francis taught me how to use them and just for comparison I recently bought a Norton 4k/8k. It should be interesting to see just how they fit in. I can tell you that Hal did sell his Norton and I once asked him if the Honemaster was finer than the 8k side. He said that it sure is. I guess I will find out for my self.

Glen

Glen

If you do come up with a good sequence for an E-bay find let me know. I like the little hones (my waterstones are only 21/2 by 4) and would like a good barber hone sequence to try. I'm just not experienced enough to buy them blind and try to work something up myself.

Tim, there are a ton of barber hones that fall into the medium fine category. I was lucky when I started that someone told me what to buy and at the time Tilly at Redtrader99 had what I needed. I highly recommend looking out for double grit hones. This should give you a medium and a fine hone with one purchase. One of my favorites is a Wester Bros. That is kind of OD green on one side and black on the other. This hone is capable of taking a razor off of ebay and turning it into a great shaver. But as we get more refined and want more, I have purchased several extra fine finishing hones. The Honemaster is my favorite along with Itsapeech and a three line Swaty. Since Tilly doesn’t have any of these left you have to keep you eyes open. Buy a few and see how they work. You may get lucky only buying a couple of different hones and get a working set. If you need information on getting them flat let me know.

Glen

p.s. I use to do Schutzund training back in the mid-seventies. Now I have two Jack Russells and a Basset. How things change with time.