Thread: New razor has a chip - suggested response?

As you can (now) see from the pic, the chip is up on the curvature of the rounded tip. So I was thinking I could hone a new radius up there and leave the straight edge part alone. There'd likely be a small transition region for taking it slow and checking with a loupe makes me hopeful I could repair without having to pull back the entire leading edge of the blade.

A couple of thoughts here. I am presuming that you are new to straight razor shaving and honing. If that is in fact true your razor may be down for longer if you try to fix it yourself. That is a guess and may be way off base. Honing is a little tricky, some people pick it up easier than others. I'm not sure you want to learn on a brand new razor, although you do want one that is free of geometry issues. It is a personal choice. Do you have a second razor?

Originally Posted by RezDog

A couple of thoughts here. I am presuming that you are new to straight razor shaving and honing. If that is in fact true your razor may be down for longer if you try to fix it yourself. That is a guess and may be way off base. Honing is a little tricky, some people pick it up easier than others. I'm not sure you want to learn on a brand new razor, although you do want one that is free of geometry issues. It is a personal choice. Do you have a second razor?

Yes, new to straights. Not new to honing; done a fair bit on knives and have made a couple of knives in the past. Honing a straight razor seems, from the vids, to be a reasonably straightforward affair since the blade is contacting at the spine and edge.

I do have a second razor. An eBay McDonald not shave-ready. My plan HAD been to get used to shaving with the Ralf Aust and use it as a model for what a well honed blade looks like as I was practicing with the McDonald ...

Hmmm. It is after all your razor. I hear from knife guys from time to time the changing to straight is not as easy as they thought. I do my own honing and transitioned into straights without it being epic. You can try and still send it out if you need to. I don't think you can take that chip out without resetting the whole bevel though, however I am not the authority and could be wrong. Good luck.

+1 on I can still send it out. That's where I'm leaning right now. It wouldn't be reasonable to ask SRP to fix it as part of the second honing free, I don't think. This wouldn't be a regular honing; it would be a repair. And if I'm going to pay for a repair, might as well try to fix it myself first. At worst it would just mean a slightly more involved repair and at best I don't have to bother anyone with it at all.

+1 to sending it in.