Thread: Hello Everyone,

my name is Steve and I'm trying to get started in straight razor shaving. I spent several weeks trying to soak up info from the net about this hobby. I have a new Dovo basic carbon steel 5/8 model on order as well as a Norton 4000/8000 whetstone, and a leather stop. I've been reading about lapping stones and I'm currious if I really need one? The Shapton GDLP is very expensive, and I've noticed that some people use some of the DMT products as well that are not quite as expensive for the same purpose. I would appreciate any advice that you could please give me in regards to lapping products.

Hey Steve, I don't know much about lapping stones, but I did want to say welcome to the site and it's nice to meet you.

Conor

The purpose of lapping is to make sure the sharpening stone is flat across the entire surface. Norton makes a lapping stone that is in-expensive, ($20-30).
An alternative to a stone is sandpaper.
Use the wet-dry paper on a flat surface (a 1 foot square granite tile works great) and wet the paper to make it stick to the flat surface.
Mark your sharpening stone with a lead pencil (DO NOT USE ANY KIND OF INK OR PERMANENT MARKER) in a criss-cross pattern across the entire face of the stone. Place the stone flat on the sandpaper.
Rub the stone a few times on the sandpaper using very little downward force and check where the pencin lines are rubbed off. The areas where there are still pencil marks are low spots on the stone. Keep rubbing the stone on the sandpaper until the pencil marks are gone and the stone will be perfectly flat.

I'm assuming this applies to barber's hones as well? I just snatched one up off of ebay and will need to make sure it's flat!

Barber hones are much harder than waterstones. You would need a lot of sandpaper to lap a barber hone. Most guys use a DMT 325 for that job.

But.... a lot of us simply clean the barber hone with soap & water then run a razor across the hone to see if any of the sides are "high". If so, then we lap it. If not then we leave it alone.

Hope this helps,

I used sandpaper (and a granite tile) on an old Boss barber hone. It took two sheets of 400-grit wet-or-dry paper, but the hone eventually gave up and flattened out.

Test frequently with pencil (as described above).

Charles

the big brown truck arrived today with my razor and other supplies. I changed my mind and went with a new pre-honed Boker carbon steel razor instead of the Dovo from SRD. I'm going to give the first straight razor shave a go this weekend with it so if you never hear back from me again I've apparently lost more blood than my body will allow in this endeavor. My plan is simple enough which is to go very sloooow with next to no pressure and let the razor do the work. I'm not sure, if that's a good plan but for now it's the plan. Hope it works out well, I'm really beginning to question my sanity about this whole thing. Oh well, I'm going to give it try anyway.

Fear is good, it prevents you from being careless.

If you move the razor at right angles to the edge -- "scraping" -- there's quite a safety margin (in pressure) between "shaving hair" and "cutting skin".

If you move the razor parallel to the edge -- "slicing" -- there's _no_ safety margin; that's when you'll cut yourself.

That's been my experience, at least.

Charles

yesterday and knicked myself numerous times during the process. I attribute that to not knowing what the Heck I'm doing at all! I'm not discouraged though and I intend to keep at it until I can shave with a straight razor without blood loss or at least very little of it. I'm leaning on the no blood loss side of the equation though. The learning curve I suspect will be very steep but I'm up to the challenge.

Welcome to SRP and great job at surviving your first attempt!

There's certainly plenty of info in these pages to get you to the VERY LITTLE bloodloss side of things. I think even the most experienced of guys could say that they may rarely knick themselves, but it can still happen. I'll let you know in several years.

Keep at it!