Originally Posted by
bluesman7
Well, Zach's razor did hone up fine in the end but not without a struggle on my part. The first thing I did was to measure the spine thickness and blade width at the toe and heal, just to get an idea of what I was dealing with. The spine tapered .015" which correlated well with the blade width. There was a visible smile in the edge, so a rolling stroke was needed. During the bevel setting, Zach noticed the heal coming off the stone as I was pulling towards myself and then later in the honing I could see with a 10x loupe that I was not hitting the heal well, but it was on the opposite side of the razor from the side that seemed to be a problem. Though out the whole thing it seemed that the stabilizer was the cause of the issues and we could see wear on the stabilizer, but it was on the side that was honing very well. Concentrating on the heal got the edge to a point that I was satisfied with and I took the razor to the strops. 55 laps on clean hemp followed by 55 on horsehide resulted in a quite impressive HHT followed by a shave test which proved the shave readiness of the edge.
After sleeping on it and thinking how weird it was that the side that seemed to have problems from the stabilizer did not show stabilizer wear and that consciously keeping the stabilizer off the hone really did not seem to help. I now think that the taper in the spine thickness was mostly on the problem side and the cause of the difficulties.
I know this is a very technical post for the introduction section and would be more appropriate for the honing section, but it seems appropriate as a follow up on Zach's first razor. Zach is presently about two and a half hours into his first full marathon. Hope all is going well for you Zach.