Discoveries

Well, yesterday I discovered what a wire edge feels like on the second shave. Yeowch. The first pass was painful, so I just washed and quit, and then noticed that the shave was miserable as well. Went back to the Lithide hone and tried again this morning. It was much better, but I only did a hasty job honing. I'll try to fix the rest later.

I have to be at work at 7:45, and I have a 45 minute commute, so normally I strop and shave by lamplight. Today I slept until the sun came up (yay!), and an unexpected benefit of this was that the light from a different direction allowed me to see the shadow of the razor as I passed it over the strop. To my surprise, I notice that the middle of the blade is not contacting the leather! It seems that because the stop is mounted by a single screw (Tony Miller beginner) it bows slightly when I pull it away from the mount. Looking at the reflection from the bevel confirms this, but simply stropping in an X pattern solved the problem.

I think I simply assumed that because the stop was as wide as the razor a straight stroke would do the job. Just goes to show that paying attention is always better.

Good observation. For the strop to be bowing like that leads me to think that you might be pulling it TOO tightly though. I have a TM seconds strop that came with my #1 Heirloom. Maybe I'll have to look at it and see what effect pulling it at various tensions does to it.