(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I use a 00 Frictionite stone, which is obsolete.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.