Thread: John from New England

When I decided to learn to hone, the gold dollars had quality issues and needed to be modified in order to be honed. I was just wanting to learn to hone. I bought NOS vintage and new razors to learn with. As new honers tend to put too much pressure on the spine and cause premature wear, I taped them. None of them suffered from my learning and are still in use. It made learning to hone very simple. Later I learned about repair when restoring some vintage razors. There are a lot of people who can hone. Near you is outback (Mike) and easily mailable is Gssixgun (Glen) and countless others. Also there is a lot of opinion and various techniques on YouTube. It’s near impossible to follow all paths at once. I found I learned easily from Gssixgun videos.

Check out Griffiths Shaving Goods. He is based in Rhode Island and from my own personal experience is a very reputable dealer of new and vintage blades as well as hones and strops.

Welcome from another member from New England (Boston metro area here). I second the recommendation to check out Griffith Shaving Goods. Matt, the owner, sells some nice vintage razors and does a good honing job on them. He also sells natural sharpening stones from Rhode Island from time to time, which may be of local interest to you if you take up honing. A couple of them can be used as finishers off, say, an 8k synth hone.

Me, I started shaving and honing straight razors in 2011.

Yep lots of people jump out of a plane before they pack a chute, but hey why shave at all just hone, that way you never know if the edge is good, call it a win win

Learn to shave! Strop!

Stropping can keep an edge keen and ready for shaving for a long time. But improper stropping will damage an edge easy too. That alone is what you should learn to do BEFORE ALL ELSE! Worry about the rabbit hole of honing next year.
Honing takes a long time to learn. It's nothing like sharpening a knife! A lot of us have been down that same road and we try to help others to not make the same mistake. Learn to shave first! After 6 months or so then learn to maintain an edge with a finishing stone or barber hone. Only a few laps are needed. A razor treated properly will not need to be honed very often. Unless your going to be a collector and/or restorer of razors (like most of us are) there is no need to buy all the stones needed for honing. we do have a couple of guys here that still push the film thing but I will leave my comment out of that one.

Originally Posted by Audels1

Very welcoming! Thank you all.
I ordered 2 gold dollars off amazon to start that journey.
.

I have a Gold Dollar that I got to practice honing and scaling etc.

The problem is that like most new razors they aren't shave ready and will need honing. That's not actually the problem now i think about it.

The real problem may be finding someone that is willing to hone them.

I was really surprised how sharp mine was after i honed it for practice, actually it's in my rotation until it needs honing again but the initial honing may have been more luck than judgement.

It is still worth getting a vintage razor from here, they are not expensive for something suitable to start with, it will come shave ready and it will be easy to find someone to hone it again when it needs it, bear in mind that the more cheap vintage razors you get yourself the less often that they need honing. I have 14 so I use each one twice a month, that's only 24 times in a year!

There are guys here that have hundreds!

The last thought, if you don't make sure you have a truly shave ready razor you won't be able to tell if your razors are sharp or need refreshing.

as STF and others said, A benchmark pro honing job is about mandatory in this hobby

I will look him up.

Originally Posted by STF

I have a Gold Dollar that I got to practice honing and scaling etc.

The problem is that like most new razors they aren't shave ready and will need honing. That's not actually the problem now i think about it.

The real problem may be finding someone that is willing to hone them.

I was really surprised how sharp mine was after i honed it for practice, actually it's in my rotation until it needs honing again but the initial honing may have been more luck than judgement.

It is still worth getting a vintage razor from here, they are not expensive for something suitable to start with, it will come shave ready and it will be easy to find someone to hone it again when it needs it, bear in mind that the more cheap vintage razors you get yourself the less often that they need honing. I have 14 so I use each one twice a month, that's only 24 times in a year!

There are guys here that have hundreds!

The last thought, if you don't make sure you have a truly shave ready razor you won't be able to tell if your razors are sharp or need refreshing.

Originally Posted by rolodave

as STF and others said, A benchmark pro honing job is about mandatory in this hobby

I plan on having someone hone the Bismarck and using that for my benchmark and shaving and using the cheapo GDs to learn on.

Hi John and welcome. Glad to have you with us. As someone who learned the hard way in the dark I can tell you that you that you are well advised to browse and ask lots of questions here. It will make life a lot easier. Don't worry about starting late. Many of us did. Fortunately there are many others of us here with lots of experience who are more than willing to help. Just about anything you could need to know has been posted here already but if you can't find it or don't even know what to look for be sure to ask. Someone will be glad to help you find it or fill you in. I don't think Steve would mind me telling that he really didn't know anything when he came here just a year and a half ago but with some time and help from friends he made here he is now an old hand at it. I'm sure you will be too sooner than you might think.
I would also say that honing is a good skill to have but more importantly learn to strop correctly first. If you learn that right and start off with a truly shave ready razor or 2 you won't need to hone for a while to come. By then you should be proficient enough at straight shaving to be able to tell what is right and what is wrong when learning to hone.
Steve is right that you can be a lot more sure about something that you get from someone here than you will be in the wild. Check bouschie's listings. He always has things for sale at a reasonable price. There are many others here too that sell vintage razors. If you send any of them a PM and explain where you are in the process they will probably point you in the right direction as far as what to buy. This is invaluable since you probably don't even know what kind you like yet.
Anyway, enjoy your time here and make sure to keep us posted on how you're doing. Oh yeah, post pictures of your gear. We love pictures.