Thread: Second Straight Experience - !@#%

The service is:
Westpfal Henry & Co Inc Cutlery
(212) 563-5990

I hone my own and have not used them but the AOS people on Madison use this company. I understand, he's been in business over 20 years.

ProfessorShak,

Almost one year ago, I decided it was time to hone my own razors. I bought a coticule and a Belgian blue. I started doing pyramids (something I picked up in thread A) between the Blue with slurry and the coticule with water (according to something read in thread B). I thought of the Blue as 4K and the coticule as 8K (information found in thread C)
I did not ask any more questions, because I expected it to be a piece of cake. After all, I had honed knifes and chisels and plane blades half my life, and the only difficulty I had with that was maintaining a constant honing angle, something that a razor does for you. How difficult could it be?
During the course of the next 3 weeks, I honed, almost every night. Doing conservative pyramids, doing standard pyramids, doing aggressive pyramids. I read thread after thread, each night, after my daily honing session, and before my nightly honing session. I stropped hard. I stropped soft. I stropped slack. I stropped taut. Sometimes, I managed to get a bearable shave. Mostly I did not.

By the end of the 3th week I was ready to swallow my pride and stubbornness and cried for help on SRP. I decided to follow only one lead, and not mix up different approaches offered by different people. The next day I managed to get a very decent edge on my razor.

Honing is not all that difficult, but if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you can spend hours performing zillions of laps leading to nothing but frustration. Once you manage to find the monkey wrench in your honing, you'll be surprised how easy it is to get a very decent shaving edge, and how much fun it is to tailor that edge to your personal preferences (for most of us that means increasingly sharper).

I don't really know what the monkey wrench in your honing is, but here are a few thoughts:

1. your DMT D8C.
Way too course to touch a razor. Certainly if that DMT is fairly new. 2 laps ruin an edge enough to need an awful lot of work on the D6E to smooth out the roughness of the D8C. The only time I ever use a DMT 325 grit on a razor, is when I need to completely rebuild an edge on a restored razor. Even then, I have an intermediate step on a DMT 600, before finalizing the bevel on a DMT-E (1200).

2. Your razors possibly don't have a good bevel, and need more work on the DMT D6E, or on the Norton 4K (depending on personal preference), BEFORE you can do anything meaningful on those finer hones.

3. Your stropping may be rounding your edges. Stropping is an art, maybe even more than honing, and those who have mastered it can be witnessed doing weird things on a strop, depending of how they assess the edge. Now is no time to fumble with stropping: strop gently on a taut strop. And never turn the razor over the edge (probably beating a dead horse, sorry)

4. Stropping on pastes is a way to sharpen razors. Honing on stones is another way to do it.
Hybride sharpening is something I consider an advanced technique. You will get a very decent edge off that Chinese 12K, and I really like to encourage you to stay away from the pastes until you're confident that you can repeat your great results off the 12K, time and time again. Only then, it is time to start experimenting with the pastes and learn what they can do for you.

I often get the impression that learning to hone is more about avoiding pitfalls than about some mojo you ought to develop before you can be successful at it .

Good luck,

Bart.