Thread: Harsh Shave

There are so many things I want to help with. The difficulty is that we are now dealing with three major things in this post.

1) The fact that you have only used a straight 3 times. This is a huge barrier to a smooth and irritation free shave. It's going to take a lot of practice with a shave ready blade to get comfortable with your face

2) Stropping. A whole other can of worms.

3) Honing. oh man...

Based on all of this, here is my new suggestion:

Get a second or third razor. It can be an ebay'er if you're careful or something from the classifieds. Take the razor you have now and send it to someone to hone. A shave ready razor is a valuable learning tool in itself. Use this razor as a bench mark for a) your honing, which will be done on razors other than this one, and b) learn to shave and strop first.

Right now you are trying to tackle the world. Take it slow, and learn from your mistakes. One of those mistakes is trying to learn to shave and to hone simultaneously. Focus on the shave first.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from honing....just maybe not while you're learning other things. When you do get into honing, it's important to have a couple of razors to play with so that you're not banging your head against the wall when you mess up your daily shaver.

Originally Posted by Maxi

There are so many things I want to help with. The difficulty is that we are now dealing with three major things in this post.

1) The fact that you have only used a straight 3 times. This is a huge barrier to a smooth and irritation free shave. It's going to take a lot of practice with a shave ready blade to get comfortable with your face

2) Stropping. A whole other can of worms.

3) Honing. oh man...

Based on all of this, here is my new suggestion:

Get a second or third razor. It can be an ebay'er if you're careful or something from the classifieds. Take the razor you have now and send it to someone to hone. A shave ready razor is a valuable learning tool in itself. Use this razor as a bench mark for a) your honing, which will be done on razors other than this one, and b) learn to shave and strop first.

Right now you are trying to tackle the world. Take it slow, and learn from your mistakes. One of those mistakes is trying to learn to shave and to hone simultaneously. Focus on the shave first.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from honing....just maybe not while you're learning other things. When you do get into honing, it's important to have a couple of razors to play with so that you're not banging your head against the wall when you mess up your daily shaver.

Point taken for taking it slow. I'm just so darn excited and curious in learning all these.

I do have a shave ready razor from whippeddog and recently from johnmrson. So it won't affect my daily shave routine.

I'll take your advise and focus more on shave and then strop.

Sy

IMHO , you might want to go back to the 1k , and hone with "X" strokes , using only enough pressure to keep the edge in contact with the hone .
Do this until you feel the edge "biting" into the hone , you should feel a slight suction between the blade and the hone . You should be able to cut arm hair above skin level at this point .

Then go to the 4k , and repeat what you did on the 1k , until you feel the biting and suction .
Give it 5 "X" strokes on the 8k , and strop it and test shave .
If it shaves well , then give it 5 strokes on the 12k , strop it up , and shave with it .
If it doesn't , go back , and give it 5 more on the 8k .
If that doesn't work , go back to the 4k .
IME , honing is a matter of tuning in to the feedback you get from the razor and the hone , and how well you understand it . This takes time , you won't learn it overnight . But if you keep at it , you will succeed .

Two things I'd like to throw into the mix....

1. Put the 12k and chrome ox away for now. Don't use them until you can get a close and comfortable shave off the 8k.
2. I found that my Genco is made of harder steel than many of my other razors, and as such took twice as much effort to hone. You may want to take that into consideration.