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A couple of q.s about honing

Yes, a properly honed razor can easily be maintained for years with just a fine finish hone and a strop.

Stropping is key, stropping is way underrated, especially linen. Flax linen is/can be aggressive, and quality clean leather can finish and edge to a much higher level than a stone. Until you perfect your stropping, the quality of the strop, does not matter much.

The trick is, it can take a year or more to perfect stropping technique to the level where you are continually improving an edge. More edges are damaged by improper stropping techniques and or contaminated strops. An edge can be trashed with a single stroke.

Pick a fine finisher, (Jnat), lap it flat and use it just for razors. With a few nagura you can create a range of aggression and finishes on the same base stone.

Get some decent lighted handheld magnification, (60X) and look at your bevels and edges to understand forward progress, damage repair and edge quality, (straightness of the edge). Confirm your visual impression with shave quality.

It is all about the edge, but we polish the bevels to polish the edge. So, what happens to the bevels affect the edge, but the look of the bevels does not always equate to edge performance. Study the bevels, learn to identify and understand what you see through the loop/scope, and causes.



The biggest difference in knife sharpening and razor honing are the goals. For a knife Sharp clean cutting is the goal.

Sharp is easy, Sharp, (cutting hair) and smooth shaving, (not cutting or removing skin) is the goal of a properly honed razor, a keen, comfortable shave.

Edge comfort for knife honing is never even a consideration.

Thank you for these thoughts! They probably confirm to me something I suspected - while I know how to sharpen (or 'hone' ;)) things quite well, the big thing is actually going to be stropping and refinement of edges.

Though I think my (somewhat niche) point about about uraoshi sharpening of yanagiba stands. And is actually the same one you make, but I probably didn't elucidate very well...

I sharpen different knives in different ways on different stones, because different knives get used in different ways. I could take two identical knives and a do progression to 1k on one and 20k on the other, give you a piece of tissue paper, and the knife at 20k is sharper, cleaner cutting.

But if I gave you a load of vegetables to try them out on then the 20k knife is useless. The edge doesn't have the teeth to break hard things (like a tomato skin) at an angle. Here the 1k knife is sharper and cleaner cutting. I want 20k sharp on a yangiba or razor, I want 1k sharp on a chef's knife.

[This is a slightly exaggerated example]
 
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But if I gave you a load of vegetables to try them out on then the 20k knife is useless. The edge doesn't have the teeth to break hard things (like a tomato skin) at an angle. Here the 1k knife is sharper and cleaner cutting. I want 20k sharp on a yangiba or razor, I want 1k sharp on a chef's knife.

Conversely the 20k knife glides through raw meat like a razor where the 1k drags like crazy.
Good to keep one for most things and one for raw meats only, its useless for everything else.
 
As a final word on this - thank you all for your thoughts!

I can confirm that, yes... the excellent strop that David made me, has noticeably improved the edge refinement, and comfort I can get. I was actually quite surprised by the extent of it. Especially given I’ve never used this kind of strop before, so my technique is probably rubbish.

Though I could shave happily straight from a very fine stone, the further improvement from stropping is certainly evident :).
 
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