Thread: Shave ready to honing needed?

I have gone many months w/o honing but YMMV. It also depends on if you use it everyday or if you have a rotation but one razor alone should last several months if honed & stropped right.

I used to get only 4 or 5 comfortable shaves out of a freshly honed edge. As I kept reading about guys getting many more shaves out of an edge I started experimenting. First with cubic boron nitride that doubled the number of shaves. Nowadays I am getting even more shaves out of my edges using a home made furniture quality flax linen webbing strop. I needn't even strop on leather afterwards.

I seem to never need honing, just buy another shave ready razor.

In seriousness, a couple few months easy. I touch up edges at the slightest pull even if they may shave well for 30 shaves. Better great shaves with minimal maintenance.

I never really thought about it. Now I think I will have to prep one of my go to razors and start counting, just to find out. I think as stated before, one key thing is the razor itself. Different properties of metal should hold an edge better than others. Maybe I will experiment with my Hart Steel, and one of my vintage razors just to see if there is a difference.

Work on stropping, it's the single most important thing to keep it shave ready, it's also the quickest way to degrading an edge if your technique is poor. My crapping stropping abilities starting out caused me to have to touch up my razors constantly. My current rotation of 7 razors hasn't been honed in 4 months and I shave 6 times a week and all of them feel like they did when they came off the hones.

I've found stainless to hold an edge much longer. They are bitch to get there but once they are there, they are there for a long time.

Originally Posted by tcrideshd

on advice from Glen I do maintenance instead of refresh as it gets to pulling. About every 7 shaves I do 4-6 laps on my naniwa 12k , it's as fresh as when I got it.
My beard is very tough and in the beginning it was not going to be long before it needed work,

read this part again

What TC wrote there is pretty important it took a little time for us to realize that he was going to do best as a "Maintenance" honer some people do better as a "When Needed" honer..

Unusually people that have tougher beards will do better on an actual Maintenance schedule, they will never let the damage to the edge from the beard accumulate, they re-fresh on a regular schedule and keep the edge at it's maximum all the
time..

Originally Posted by jfk742

Work on stropping, it's the single most important thing to keep it shave ready, it's also the quickest way to degrading an edge if your technique is poor. My crapping stropping abilities starting out caused me to have to touch up my razors constantly. My current rotation of 7 razors hasn't been honed in 4 months and I shave 6 times a week and all of them feel like they did when they came off the hones.

This is so true, stropping really makes a difference and it takes practice to go form doing no harm to actually improving the edge with stropping

It takes some time to figure out what is going to fit your situation best

I have some razors with 50+ shaves on them, and they are fine.

And one I have about 20 shaves on, and its starting to need a touch up. Go figure!