Thread: Life span of a Straight Razor?

aaaah ok.
The idea is to hone it just every 2-3 months (or as needed) to restore the blade to a proper pre-stroping state.

I do not shave too often (once every 2 weeks) but I'm sure things will change drastically and I'll be shaving around twice a week hehe. I'll let you know what I find.

How long it lasts between honings has a great deal to do with how well you prep your beard, how tough your beard is, how many razors there are in your rotation, and your stropping technique. If you are using a couple of razors, stropping a well honed edge properly, preparing your beard properly and stropping properly six months is about right - but that also verys with the razor.

Properly maintained a straight razor will probably last your life time and into your son's.

Your razor will need to be stropped before each shave, (and some with wire like beards - even if honed properly will need to strop during the shave). I also strop after cleaning the razor up just to make sure the cutting edge - where you definately don't want a corrosion process to take hold - is absolutely dry.

I would say strop with no paste daily; pasted strop once a week; hones about once a month.

You can get by with some slipstones. They are about $15 USD at woodworking shops. The 1000 grit is good for sharpening knive or as a flattening stone. The 4000 grit and 8000 grit will work well with some patience. They worked great with my Dovo. They did nothing for my Wapi.

(Gosh, this is a great site, but registering for it was almost just not worth it. My bank has less security paranoia. Simplify it, guys. Captcha! is more than enough.)

I use a 00 Frictionite stone, which is obsolete. I don't know what grit it is, I'll guess around 5000, and it's usually so full of filings it's effectively finer than that. Honing is not hard, you just have to do it methodically, patiently, and understand what the point is of it. Unlike regular knife sharpening, the spine of a straight razor is laid against the hone as well as the flat, defining a consistent angle. As long as the spine and edge are both in contact, and you are using mild pressure and pulling evenly across the whole blade, you will have an angle and it can't go wrong. Find a loupe and learn what a sharp blade needs to look like under magnification, and understand that certain microscopic nicks are probably not going to affect your shave or cut you. But remember that honing does take off metal. If you hone your blade more than necessary, you are going to shorten the lifespan unnecessarily.

How many sharpenings is enough to finally render the blade unusable? That knowledge used to exist, but there are probably only a few people in the world who can really say! You'll may ask the Gillette disposable blade engineers, who may have some idea of the necessary angle and thickness -- but then these six-bladed things are a different animal already. Know that since the spine is also in contact with the hone, the more you hone, the more the spine will be worn flat and therefore the more delicate the edge you will be making. You will see the edge broaden as the spine flattens out. I suppose it would take many hundreds of aggressive hones to finally make the edge so thin that it will not hold long. Too, since the hardness of the steel will be a factor in this last point, my guess is that the newer (stainless) blades may fare better and longer than the older, softer blades as they thin out.

If you want to sharpen any blade, it is the selfsame concept as sanding. You begin with lower grits and move up to higher grits. Even if you have some giant nick in your blade, you can probably start with an 800-grit knife stone for 15 or 20 strokes total per side, and use a loupe to see if you've knocked it down. Then you go progressively finer until you get into the thousands and your edge is so fine that you can't see the grit lines with a good loupe. You might mark the edge with a Sharpie to get an idea of how much metal you're taking off (this works on any blade, from straight razor to axe).

I shave only two or three times a week (I work most of the week at home ) and feel I need to hone maybe once every year or so. I could probably do it less often than that. I make sure my blade is totally dry before putting away (I leave it open on the toilet tank for a while before folding it. I don't put it in a coffin except when traveling.) I am giving a 120-year-old Crown razor to a friend next week as a gift and so I gave it a few strokes with a 00 Frictionite and then dried it carefully and coated it with a very light coat of mineral oil before putting it back into the coffin.

I do not always strop every time I shave, though I have found that the shave is better when I do. Note that you can use a safety razor blade quite a number of times ("without stropping," as it were). Same logic, naturally.

I use only one blade, and I don't understand the need to have a series unless perhaps you're shaving daily. The arguments about stropping are varied; I think I've read elsewhere that stropping should be done rarely, because you want the "fin" to maintain itself, but my experience is that practically speaking this is not accurate.

Arguments about nearly invisible things see seem sometimes to get a little high-church or faith-based (kind of like the registration system here), and then impractical. Some of us here do this specifically to escape the mystique of the market, where we surrender ourselves to expertise. We are the experts here, because it doesn't take much to be one.

In general, if we can't explain why we're doing things (like the layers of mind-numbing security on a basic vBulletin website*), we lose sight of the true meaning behind things, and the reason we do what we do. The mystique rises and turns all but the hardcore away. When we put our straight-razors into perspective as members of a class of all metal blades, and stone and strops into members of classes with other stones and steels, we can draw sensible, logical, inexpensive conclusions about what's good for our blades.

*I had to type "straight razor place" three times before I finally realized I had to type "straightrazorplace", and this was after the almost illegible Captcha, and still I had to agree to abide etc., etc., (sure, I'll do it) three times, and then I had to wait for an e-mail. It's like Fort Knox.

At the risk of being excommunicated, may I suggest a Shavette . You can obtain a Parker clone at a price under 10$us. It uses 1/2 DE razor blades so cost is minimal. No honing, no Stropping you can start this way and move into a straight straight. With a horse brush and blades from Bestshave, a Shavette from DX and soap from the store. Your at ~10$us.

Interesting response to a thread from 2009, if you find your Frictionite Obsolete please send it my way!

If I hone a blade,it will be trash within a couple hrs)

Welcome. I had no problem joining up. Harder to get out than to get in, IMO. A 00 Frictionite SHOULD be much finer than 5k, but I have not had one. Just going by what has been said about them by respected members. Most I know will strop before and after each shave. Seems to be the way to go and seems to have always been. As far as it not taking much to be a so-called "expert" to hone, or even use a straight razor properly, I can digress and excuse myself from further discussion.
After you get thru the multi-layers of security to be here, perhaps you would go to new member introductions and introduce yourself. Get to know the forum and some of it's members before many claims are made. You might be suprised what you can learn and share, about your 00 Frictionite as well as lifespan of razors!
No one here purports to know it all. We all learn every day!

Originally Posted by pzelchenko

(Gosh, this is a great site, but registering for it was almost just not worth it. My bank has less security paranoia. Simplify it, guys. Captcha! is more than enough.)

Our security settings are geared to keep spam bots, and spammers out of our forum. Been working pretty well. I only went as far as 8th grade in formal schooling but didn't have a problem figuring out the prompts to register. Like everything else in shaving and in life, YMMV. Welcome to SRP.

Getting a high grit, or a good coticule stone should provide you all you need as said before. But be care as you can come up with a great disease from this. We like to call the Razor Acquisition Disorder (RAD), and Hone Acquisition Disorder (HAD). And it is very hard to get over this sickness.