Originally Posted by
DaveW
Two cases for the linen - and it's a vintage silk finish treated genuine linen type for me, all the way:
1) it will increase the time between honings by a factor of ten while doing almost nothing to the geometry of a razor over hundreds of shaves. You can make hundreds of shaves, have little metal on the linen, and refinish the razor literally with your finest stone in five minutes
2) for stones that don't have good initial sharpness, like many coticules or some other barber hones. the stone will set the geometry and the linen will gradually create a smooth edge as it's used. You end up with a shaving edge that is smooth and much more keen than the stone itself could create going just to leather.
I use mine once per week, and shave every day (so the razor sees the linen once every 7 shaves). The razor edge even after 200 shaves is almost the same as it was at the 2nd shave, the honing at that point on some razors is little more than a double check to make sure the geometry is still in shape.