Thread: New guy from NL walking in

Hey all,

After reading hours and hours of websites and watching videos, this SR virus got to me. It started out with a commercial for BoldKing.com on Dutch TV, a brand that sells cartridges cheaper than for example Gillette. I decided to Google it, and suddenly a whole new world of shaving opened up to me. Safety razors, shavettes, straight razors, all those things I've never seen in real life.

1 of the things that eventually got me all dizzy were all the variables in this game: the blades, the brushes, cream or soap (and after you made the choice: which brand do you choose?), strops, pre-shave or not, honing and the stones, etc. etc.
Man, so much to choose from! Where do you start?

I've visited a store today, had a nice long chat about all of this and got advice on many different parts (smelled and tried some cremes, etc.). Walked out the door eventually with a Dovo Celludir 5/8, some Proraso creme and pre-shave, alum stick, styptic pencil and part of a dead badger bound together. I chose a more expensive 3'' strop, as I believe that's a little more userfriendly for a new guy (no x-stroke stropping or other patterns; first let me get used to this stuff).
The strop doesn't have linen or canvas side to it though. The shop employee told me he didn't see the need of stropping on a linen/canvas side, nor did he hear of touching up with chromium oxide on the inner side of the linen/canvas as I saw Lynn Abrams do in one of his videos. Any feedback on this is welcome! The other strops in the shop were much smaller, but did have a linen side. Would that be better?

Honing: it probably sounds ridiculous for a guy who didn't even try his SR yet to even THINK about honing, but...as I mentioned in the introduction, reducing costs is one of the factors that got me to a SR. Sending a SR to get it honed will likely both cost me money for the honing, and how do I shave when my SR is away for a week or more? That would require me to get a second SR, so even more costs.
That's why I'd like to learn how to hone in a while if I know if a SR really is my kind of game. Didn't buy a stone yet, even though I was tempted to it. There was a corticule 4k/8k for €40, but even though I'm the "dive in all the way" kind of guy, my good sense jumped in and said "How about trying a few strokes, and after a while a full shaving, without creating a blood bath first?" which seemed like a wise idea to me ;-)
Before visiting the store, I did check some websites to see if anyone offers cheap, second-hand SRs, which I might use to learn how to hone. Or could a bad blade mess up a honing stone?

Sorry for making this a long introduction, guys! Hopefully you'll have some feedback or input for me, and maybe some guys from NL can tell me where to get an SR honed in NL without costing a lot, or how/where to learn it myself.

Thank you!

Best regards,
"Aldo Raine"