Originally Posted by
mdarnton
As someone who's been sharpening tools constantly a good portion of every day of the last 30+ years of my life, as any craftsman who works with hand tools does, I hate this "honemeister" stuff. It makes people think that there's some mythological greatness involved in sharpening, which there definitely is not. You put it on the stone and shove it around until it's sharp. The first straight I ever held, I said "Oh, this is going to be SO easy--I've never had a tool that was so well designed just for sharpening", and it is.
A real artisan craftsman never marks his territory like a dog on someone else's work. Even on those watches, I bet it's inside where the customers can't see it. My bet is that this is something that owners did to remind themselves of how they sharpened it, and if there are a lot of examples, I bet you can track it to some instruction sheet somewhere or 1890-vintage shaving blog or forum. I can't imagine that any professional guy sharpening things would need this kind of notation on the side of a customer's razor. If you need notes, or try to make it seem to your customers like it's magic, you're a charlatan.