Thread: HONNING AND STROPPING.

Originally Posted by Chris-L

Can you explain what you mean when you refer to "harm" to the edge that a paste may or may not cause? Do you mean a wire edge?

No not a wire edge. I was talking about the excessive arching that leads to a steep angle at the edge, or too much pressure which causes the pastes to coarsely. Just as with stones, if you use a lighter touch the abrasives cut more slowly and finely; use too much pressure and they cut fast and coarse and create a duller edge, even if the final angle is ok. The trick with pastes is that the more flexible or compressible your substrate is, the more careful you have to be about being consistent with your pressure (and tension on an hanger), because they tend to put more pressure on the edges of the bevel than the middle of the bevel, cutting those areas faster and leading to the arched bevel shape. A little too much slack and you've got a very steep cutting bevel and you may have to remove a lot of metal to get things back into shape so the pasted strop will contact the edge under normal circumstances. This may be another reason why pastes have gotten the reputation of only working for a little while - one slip in your technique and the bevel is so arched that it will take a bunch of laps to get the bevel back to where it was. Since stropping is so "easy" the obvious explanation is that the pastes aren't working anymore and it's time to hone, when really the issue was a slipup in your stropping technique. This is what I found when I went to a really hard incompressible substrate, that the pastes didn't "stop working" with lots of honing, even if I got a bit sloppy or careless.

I vaguely recall being worried about overhoned edges from pastes back when I first started, but I don't know if it was something I ever experienced myself or just heard about and repeated. But I don't think I've ever gotten a wire edge from pastes myself, and Verhoeven never seems to have gotten them either in his honing paper. So there may be some particular set of circumstances that cause this to happen with pastes. I'd be curious if you can fix this with a bit of pyramiding on the pastes. Although pyramiding is a bit more of a chore on pastes because of the cross-contamination issue.

In Belgium, many straight razor shavers use this method. There's a famous store in Antwerp ("De Koordenwinkel") that organizes shaving and honing courses. They teach what I believe to be more or less the unofficial Dovo method, using a progression of their green, red and black pastes. (roughly: 6, 3 and 1 micron - 4K-8K-16K).

From time to time the bevel is re-flatted on a Coticule with slurry.

This method creates good and sharp edges, that are shaveready from the red paste and upwards. I have used it for a while, and the only reason I started considering something else, is not because they lacked keenness, or because I got wire edges, but because the longevity of those edges was very poor for me. 3 shaves at the very maximum. Some people solve this by doing a few licks on the pasted strop before every shave. It works, but I worried about the steel removal, in the long run.
Another thing I found, is that no matter what, there's always a moment where the convexity becomes too "round". Even if you start out on a very taut loom strop, after a while the stropping looses efficiency. Loosening the adjustment screw for a bit of extra slack, gets it going again, but 2 or 3 touch-ups later, I always got tempted loosening the screw some more. At the same time, extra slack in the hanging strop needs to follow, which was very difficult to keep record of when rotating razors in various state of convexity.

In the end I started reading on SRP and took the honing route.
Can't say that I regret it. I sometimes still use CrO on a loom strop, very sparingly, only before the first test shave after honing, if the situation calls for it. Off the finishing hone, I expect a razor to be at "popping hairs" level, when probed with a HHT. When I strop that edge, I expect a clear shift in the direction of "felling hairs silently" on the same HHT. About 7 out of 10 times, I get that improvement with the clean leather strop. In the 3 remaining cases, I need 10 additional light laps on a taut CrO strop. I have not noticed the longevity issues from that practice.
I think it makes a big difference whether the edge is largely shaped in the stropping direction, or whether the fin is just a bit touched with an extremely fine abrasive.

But, as Mparker672 explained in such clear words, it certainly can be done, and some extremely keen edges can be put on a razor, far easier than can be done with hones. For as long as they last. That may largely depend on beard type, and maybe even on the razors. I didn't own a single stainless steel razor in my pasting days.

Bart.

Hi,

Thanks for your comments. Very good place to learning about straight razors and stuff. Some French friends of mine that shaving with cut throats agree with the methode of stropping with pasted looms instead of honning the blades with water stones and similar things. They hone their blades at first when get a new straight in a professional service and then they use the pasted loom strops only. They hone their straight on water stones no longer. It seems to be that european style are different that american one.

I have been buying quite a few razors from the French eBay lately, and many that I see listed there have a very distinct frown. In my mind, I have connected these frowns to excessive trips to a pasted strop over years of use, and too little honing. Anyone care to comment?

Most of the frowns I've seen have come from curved blades. Though I suppose if you used a narrow pasted strop or a narrow hone extensively (both of which seem common in europe), and weren't careful to distribute the wear evently, it could also cause this problem.