Thread: Is my razor sharp enough? HHT says NO! Your thoughts?

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

...I can tell by a TPT and by popping hair on my arm or leg, without touching the skin, where my keenness level is. For so many new guys if a razor doesn't pass HHT they are convinced that it isn't shave ready and that ain't , as George Gershwin said, necessarily so.

I'm still trying to figure out if I have enough sensation in my thumb pads to determine anything beyond a binary "sticky or not", but that arm/leg hair test is definitely the method that was the easiest for me to calibrate. Does it seem like every hair is being grabbed and cut, or just some/most of them? How much resistance do I feel with the blade going through thicker areas of leg hair? How much resistance do the hair follicles register? -- these are the tests that most accurately reflect how my shave will go.

After doing it hundreds of times while fiddling around with different hones, I can get a pretty good idea about how I'm doing with one quick "tree top" swipe up the side of my leg.

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Since we're talking about calibration and whatnot, there's something else I'd like to throw out there: cutting thread. If you have a spare spool lying around, this can make for a good test, too. The goal is to loop the thread around the razor and hold the two ends together between thumb and forefinger. The test is how easily the blade cuts this loop. With a sufficiently sharp edge, there is very little resistance, but it gets much more noticeable if the edge isn't quite there yet.

Of course, like any calibrated test, it means nothing the first several times you do it, but after a while it works pretty well - especially since the thread is always the same.

Two things I'd like to point out for anyone who might try this:

1. like hair, not all thread is alike. If you find that the thread cuts too easily, get slightly thicker thread.

2. when the edge of the blade makes contact with the inside of the loop you're holding, it's likely that it won't be at *exactly* the opposite point of the loop from your fingers. This can result in a slicing action and skew your results. The way around this is to let the blade make contact while you're holding the thread loosely in your fingers, and then to tighten your grip on the thread only once the blade has taken the slack out of the loop. In other words, let the blade's contact point determine where you end up gripping the thread. See here for a visual.