Thread: Most recent attempt

Originally Posted by xman

I do my whole against pass with water only. A good cream will leave my face more than slick enough.

X

Wow bold. I still use cream on the second pass but I like using the cream. I may try the water only someday.

Originally Posted by xman

I do my whole against pass with water only. A good cream will leave my face more than slick enough.

I wouldn't recommend it to newbies, but I intermingle my first and second passes. First stroke with lather, followed immediately by a different stroke on the same area without lather or water (usually with/across or lr/rl. If my initial lather is wet and slippery enough then I've got 5-10 secs or so after that first stroke before the face dries out too much for the second stroke. If it does dry out then a wet finger gives enough water to finish the stroke.

This is great advice - but, as you say, Michael - might be a bit hard for beginners to get right at first

Cheers
Ivo

Today, I tried using the 14 positions recommended in the barber manuals. The poor results left me with a great lesson. I can't do the L-R pass on the chin. I have to actually divide my chin into 3 sections: straight down the middle and kind of diagonal on either side (that seems to be how my hair grows).

The other issue I'm trying to figure out is the cutting angle. I've heard 30 degrees is optimum but I can't figure out what that looks like on my face. The barber manual said to keep the spine "just" off the face but that seemed to be too flat and nothing really got cut well. For some reason, I still have a lot of beard left after doing a N-S pass. I know the razor is sharp enough because Lynn took care of it for me.

So from today's experience I've learned that I need to do a regular N-S and S-N pass on the sides of my face, one N-S pass seems good on my neck and nothing I've tried gets really close on the chin and upper lip yet. My blood loss today was a few minimal drops and I suspect that I didn't so much cut myself as I did rip a few hairs out using a L-R pass on my chin.

Use the spine thickness as a guide. The spine of the razor is about 15 degrees thick for any razor in decent shape, regardless of size or grind. So keep the spine about 1.5-2 spine thicknesses off your face and you'll be about the right angle.

Having a lot of hair left after the N-S pass isn't terribly unusual, this pass really just shortens the whiskers so the later passes can deal with the remaining stubble easier. I would avoid against-the-grain passes completely at this stage, you have to have very good prep and lather and be very careful in order to do this safely. A cross-grain pass is a lot safer and gets you 80% of the way there, and since you usually need to do a cross-grain pass before an against-the-grain pass anyway...

Originally Posted by mparker762

Use the spine thickness as a guide. The spine of the razor is about 15 degrees thick for any razor in decent shape, regardless of size or grind. So keep the spine about 1.5-2 spine thicknesses off your face and you'll be about the right angle.

Great, that's a perfect visual for me. I'll give that a shot Saturday. Thank you!