Thread: interesting thing dawned on me today....

You could always just try to shave directly off the stone, omitting the stropping. That would show you exactly what is gained from the stone, and what is from the stropping. I have shaved directly off most of my hones, it is quite interesting and rarely very uncomfortable.

Originally Posted by str8fencer

You could always just try to shave directly off the stone, omitting the stropping. That would show you exactly what is gained from the stone, and what is from the stropping. I have shaved directly off most of my hones, it is quite interesting and rarely very uncomfortable.

Yes, I have read of this and done this, once. So only on one razor. It was not a bad shave at all, not even overly harsh (my first few shaves are "harsh" after honing). My theory is that with stropping, you're re-aligning. With honing, it's more forceful than stropping because you're putting the edge's face, only one side, in contact with a hard surface, and of course it's edge-first not spine-first when done conventionally (my apologies to MC aka gammaray (I had the same suspicion!)). But in theory you could just lightly refresh an edge on your finisher with far fewer laps than for stropping, but of course you're removing just a little metal, revealing fresh metal so it's not the same. But the idea is that you would also be re-aligning the metal very efficiently (or removing the worst offending misaligned "teeth"). In my head, straight off the hones I'm dealing with an edge which could be fairly aligned, but the teeth are oh-so-subtly pushed in one direction from the last stroke off the hone.