Thread: Living up to my screen name

Well it sure sounds like I've goofed somewhere judging from your advice. The first 2 or 3 shaves with a razor go very smoothly but then things just seem to quickly go down hill. Thanks for helping me narrow down the problem to honing or stropping. I'll have to mess around with that while I get this meet up working. Can't wait to meet up! I feel like I've been banging my head against a wall trying to make the straight razor stars align and I'm getting close I'm just not quite there yet. It will be good to have someone check my technique.

Effective stropping is critical for straight shaving success. Getting a shave ready razor is not difficult, but it will not stay that way for long without good stropping skills. Although honing seems to get all the love, with good daily stropping with the periodic use of a pasted strop for touchups, one can avoid returning to the hones for a long time. It is entirely feasible to send a well stropped razor out to a honemeister for occassional periodic rehoning, but straight shaving will soon become unfeasible without an effective stropping after each use of the razor.

Assuming your blades are properly shave ready I'm thinking this is a combination of inadequate stropping and improper shaving technique. A lot has been said already about the power of stropping, so I'll move on to shaving.

Shaving technique is more than just dragging a sharp blade down your face. Angle, pressure and stroke all combine to influence edge longevity. If they are off your blade will dull significantly fast; conversely, if those factors are sound your blade will last quite some time.
Something that will help you out a lot is the scything stroke, which was heavily advocated by a former member here, but it does work very well to make your edge last. Good luck and have fun.

In my first year of straight razor shaving my stropping was incorrect. The blade was not sitting fully flat on the leather and basically, the edge was not improving. The difficulty with stropping as a beginner is that you don't really know how the blade is supposed to feel when you are doing it right. My eureka moment was when I finally was able to get that rasping sound with the slight resistance on my laps, which was the indication that the razor edge is sitting flat on the leather.

Watched some videos on stropping and adjusted my technique a bit and I got very good feed back from my latigo strop. I'm not sure what sound I'm exactly looking for but what I received was a loud metallic scratching sound. Its hard to describe having never heard it before but I got a great shave afterwords. I'll have to try scything motions, I've never used those before; see what happens.
As far as my angles go I mostly do WTG and XTG. I've semi mapped my face and try not to go ATG because of ingrown hair problems I've gotten in the past from doing that. I think my real problem is that I've had such bad experiences with blades going dull from my whiskers that I believed the same thing would happen to a straight razor when clearly you have all demonstrated that shouldn't happen. I'll still boast of course that if anyone needs a cartridge razor destroyed in three days to send them my way.

The reason I turned to straight razor shaving was the same as you. I can kill cartridges really quick. 2-3 shaves was my norm. 5 shaves was a blessing. Right now I know I am not really all that good at honing but I can get a good month in before I need to touch up. This includes shaving from a full thick beard down to baby butt. My time between touch ups has been getting longer apart slowly but there shouldn't be dull razors after a few shaves. For me... at the beginning stropping was killing my edge. Technique got better and touch ups spread out.

This months Beginners Tips might also be of some help

http://straightrazorpalace.com/begin...er-2012-a.html