Thread: Its not you its me.....

Send it Lynn Abrams at SRD. It will be ready when it comes back.

Straight shaving requires persistence to learn. But, persistence doesn't mean that you keep soldiering on, despite negative results. As the other guys said, get the razor honed well, and do not strop it for the first use after you get it back.

Read "Your First Shave" in the library. At least 10 times. Don't try to shave your whole face. The results will not be good, and the chance that you will overwork the edge of the razor is high.

Have fun and take your time. This is a two steps forward, one step back deal.

My line for this is: "Teaching yourself how to shave with a straight razor is like teaching yourself how to play the piano with a correspondence course" - Learning to hone by yourself is like learning how to tune that piano using a book...
You can do it by breaking the process down in to steps - but if you can find a mentor in the area a few hours will save you months of trial and error and many units of blood...not to mention some serious frustration...

but we are all with you...Shave on...

I learned to hone a razor from watching Lynn Abrams videos, then trial and a lot of error. I kept at it an now get very good results. Nice thing about blogs like this is there are so many people willing to help and teach you the right way. It's not called the "Art of Shaving" for nothing.

Gave it another try yesterday. Much better results. Paid more attention to angle of blade and also way less pressure. Still a little unsure about how to do the mustache but its coming along. So I think it wasnt the honer, it was pretty clearly me.

Glad to hear you got a better shave. There's a lot of little things that, when added up, make for a great shave.
Keep at it and it'll come.

No pressure needed, as the saying goes, just shave the lather.
Let the razor do it's job, no need to force it to

Originally Posted by MrZ

Gave it another try yesterday. Much better results. Paid more attention to angle of blade and also way less pressure. Still a little unsure about how to do the mustache but its coming along. So I think it wasnt the honer, it was pretty clearly me.

Great to see that you are getting better results. Keep at it and you will get better and better. Thanks for the update, I think that it is encouraging for new comers to see that there will be better shaves ahead.

Just had a coworker compliment me on my shave! This has never happened in my entire life. Wow.