Quote Originally Posted by Maxi View Post
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