E-Bay Clauss Restore Help

I am trying to get a Clauss I picked up on E-Bay ready to shave. This is the first razor that has not been made shave ready by someone else first, so I am pretty sure my issues are due to my lack of practice with hones.

First I removed the oxidation from the blade with Maas until it looked really shiny and nice. Then I did about 25-30 passes on the Spyderco medium in groups of 5 until it seemed to cut a few arm hairs (or at least tug on them). Then I did 20 passes each on the Fine and Ultrafine until it seemed fairly sharp and cut arm hairs reasonably well (but still not like my sharp razors). I then proceeded to do 15 passes on a .5 pasted strop and then 15 on linen and 40 on leather.

It glided cleanly across my face, but cut nothing still! It still cut arm hairs as well. Obviously I did a lousy job setting the bevel or removing the years of oxidation, but am not really sure how to hone this razor correctly.

Can anyone give me some good tips on using Spyderco hones to get an old blade shave ready?

Brad,

Unfortunatly, I don't think there are all that many of us who use the Spyderco trio for honing but the same rules apply no matter what brand hones you use. You need to get the bevel/edge as near perfect as you can on your coarse hone first. The fine and ultra fine hones will be used to refine the edge by polishing it. If it's not razor sharp off the coarse hone, it won't get sharper on the finer hones. It might be helpful if you had some kind of magnified viewer (30x loupe is good enough for most) to get a clearer picture of what's going on. Many times on these ebay razors there is some corrosion along the edge and you need to keep honing until you get to good steel but this is something that you can't really see with the naked eye. Sometimes you can hone such a razor up and everything feels good but when you go to shave the edge deteriorates after a half dozen strokes as it's actually crumbling and chipping. By the sounds of your description though, you did not go far enough with the coarsest hone, you need to establish both bevels and a clean edge before you can polish it up to smooth razor edge. You could try the felt pen trick, coloring the bevel on both sides then doing a few passes on the hone to see if all the ink is gone but again, you really need some magnification to see if you are honing right to the very edge.

You might want to post a query on using the Spyderco's in progression as I can only think of one fellow that is using them and I can't remember who it was but he might not read this thread if he's not interested in Clauss razors for example.


Regards

Christian