Thread: something to add for new buyers

In the beginners guide on the home screen, if you follow down to equipment and click on straight razors it takes you to a wealth of information. In that information it lists things to stay away from when buying a razor. One thing that isn't listed is a spine that has been ground down excessively. It may be useful to a new-comer to the field to have that information. The reason i post this is that it happened to me :P .

Hone wear is not in there ? I guess I learned it from reading descriptions in show and tell. Oh and maybe in the e-Bay section. ....auctions. You can learn a lot in there.

Originally Posted by 10Pups

Hone wear is not in there ? I guess I learned it from reading descriptions in show and tell. Oh and maybe in the e-Bay section. ....auctions. You can learn a lot in there.

It is there. When doing research for razors one will see many images of new razors and how the spine should look like, excessive spine wear is easily detected then.

Alas if only the Honmiesters of the past would have found a use for or could have sourced the equivalent of our electrical tape then there would be some magnificent looking vintage razors to be found today.

I must not have read it very well, I was looking at the "the straight razor", "buying razors", and "serious issues" areas. I am sure that now understanding the site navigation better and how to word my questions in relation to a razor I would have no problem finding that stated information. Being that i was BRAND new I didn't. At my own expense I decided to not take the don't buy off ebay advice. But live and learn

It is a problem for specialized sites like ours to properly communicate with new guys who are completely unfamiliar with the field, the lingo, the structure.... Those who have been around for years know what is where and may think it is obvious, when in fact it isn't at all, it's just their familiarity that makes it so.

Just as one crazy example - few years back when we did the last major upgrade I went to great lengths to keep everything as close as possible to the old look. Still there were tons of complaints from the long-time regulars about why things have changed when they saw no reason whatsoever. For example they thought that a link called 'usercp' makes a lot more sense than Settings and were mad that it got renamed. Or that the 'New posts' button had moved 2 inches to the left (even though the new location was much more visible when navigating a page).

On the opposite side, beginners tend to thing that their latest mistake is the one that is the most important one to highlight and that everybody else should be aware that this is the thing to pay most attention too. But that is rarely the case, and it is impossible to emphasize everything. There are 100 things to mind but nobody wants to read 100 pages (or even 10 pages) which would cover these things. Most people want to read one short paragraph and learn from it everything that they need to know.

So in practice the best is to write something relatively short, which addresses the critical points, and then provide references for more details and lower priority items.

Buying old razors I think is quite a bit lower on the priority list. There are a lot of things to know about it and even with the most comprehensive guide beginners without experience will still make a lot of mistakes just because all of us think we're smarter than we actually are.

We have a whole forum section about buying old razors on ebay and there are tons of threads showing good razors as well as bad razors. In fact there is a thread ebay101 which shows a lot of typical examples that tend to be overlooked. But going through those threads takes a lot of time. Unfortunately there simply isn't a shortcut.

The best advise really is, beginners should stay away from ebay and instead purchase a razor that is already good to go from somebody who already has the experience and knows what they're doing. It can be new razor, it can be old razor, it doesn't matter. The factory edges of new razors these days are nothing like those of the new razors in the old days, so the only way to start this right is to rely on a person with knowledge and experience, which luckily is far easier to find than it was 10 years ago.



I still think that our reference information targeted to beginners could be improved a lot. The reality is that quite a few of them are not going to register, read the forum, or ask questions on the forum - they only rely on that reference information we have put out. But it's one thing to need something done and completely different to have it done.