Does the finishing stone matter if you're going to use CrOx or Diamond?

[IMightBeWrong]

Just curious... Say you use a 4K-8K progression and finish on Balsa with .5 Micron paste of some sort. Would you notice a difference going from the 4K-8K to a finishing stone of some sort and then still finishing on pasted Balsa, or would the end result feel the same?

 

[Jnatcat]

What ever you finish on is the edge you have so for example say you use a coticule, JNAT or synthetic high grit finisher to do your finish and then go to a pasted strop or balsa strop that's been pasted with .5 CrOx or diamond paste you now have a CrOx or diamond paste edge, I personally find a diamond pasted edge harsh that leaves my face feeling scrubbed but have found out that using CrOx to be a tad more pleasant as from my understanding CrOx has a more rounded profile compared to diamond paste.

The thing about either one of these two items is it does not take many laps to polish/tune an edge and doing say 20-30 laps is going to be way to many, I have played around with both CrOx and diamond paste and find that after coming off a JNAT finisher and doing just 10 laps it makes a huge difference in the edge but it's an edge that I personally find to harsh but some prefer that keen of an edge due to their beard type.

I would say if your not sure what type of edge your face will like is try all of them so that would be a few different natural edges ( Coti, JNAT, Thuri ) then a high grit synthetic edge and then a pasted edge, nothing wrong with using paste or spray to refresh an edge though.

 

[Slash McCoy]

8k is roughly equivelant to 3u.12k is roughly equivelant to 1u. If you go from 3u to .5u in one jump, that is a 6x jump. To get the full benefit of progressive honing you would want smaller jumps. I would say no more than a 3x jump if you can help it. Coming off an 8k stone you will probably see continued improvement in the edge for a LOT of laps on .5u abrasive. Now if you went from the 8k to a 1u abrasive, that would be more to my liking. Unfortunately for CrOx it only comes in one grade. Call it .5u. Call it .3u. The particle size varies enough that there is a lot of wiggle room. This is just one of many reasons I prefer diamond.

I feel that it is beneficial to carry a synthetic stone or film progression out to the 1u or 12k stage before hitting the lapped balsa progression. This keeps the bevel geometrically more precise further into the process. A very very slight rounding occurs when stropping on pasted balsa, and that is not a bad thing at this stage. I generally go .5u, .25u, and .1u diamond on balsa, applied SPARINGLY and RUBBED IN WELL on LAPPED FLAT BALSA. I use way more laps than what is classically accepted in the conventional wisdom. I find that the .5u to .25u range can indeed feel a little harsh but that continuing on to .1u makes the edge feel very smooth again. I don't have a clue why that might be.

I honestly don't know how much better 12k stone followed by a diamond progression would be, compared to an 8k stone followed by a diamond progression. Very likely there would be no discernable difference, with proper technique, I don't know. I do think about all those little details and when you add up their cumulative effect it can become significant.

Buffered honing with lather or some other viscuous fluid with diminishing pressure on your well lapped 8k stone can give you results not much inferior to 12k honing, actually. It just takes a lot of laps to get the full effect, and you probably won't nail it the first few times out. If you dont have a 12k or similar finisher, and dont want to buy one, then yuo can go with 1u lapping film, or make the best of what you got and see where it takes you. At one time an 8k Norton edge was considered pretty good, after all.

 

[Dick peck]

Lapping film is a good way to further polish before strop I have found. Even after final stone I do laps on 16K film then pasted strop. I have noticed good edge becomes great after film and strop . BTW my new Arkansas stone with lather has given me the best edge so far. Before I had only a king 1K 6K. If money is not an issue a finer stone wouldn't hurt. If price is a factor lapping film is a great way to experiment. I'm no expert but I have been shaving with my edges since the beginning and it gets better as I get more experience. Good luck

 

[buca3152]

Everything matters up to point you use the paste. Bevel and mid work has to be done correctly to get the most out of the finish.

 

[Lmarkow]

Kinda like my, "Whose edge is this?" question: If Bill hones one of my razors on one of his jnats, and I love it for 5 or 6 shaves, then do a touch up with my Naniwa 12k, do I have Bill's jnat edge, or a synth?

 

[buca3152]

Ah? Maybe. Lol. Bottom line is shave technique and good stropping can take the edge a long way. If I do 40 or 50 on CLEAN linen and then 80 to 100 on leather there is a very noticeable difference. Add paste and there much more.

 

[IMightBeWrong]

Some good info here. I was considering a Naniwa 12. I already have a CNAT for a finisher. The question arises as I was wondering if this would be redundant if I choose to finish on paste anyway.

 

[buca3152]

You can stay where you are. If the shave you get is to your liking. Or you could chase the rainbow and see where it leads to. Hahaha. The rabbit hole is deep.

 

[IMightBeWrong]

You can stay where you are. If the shave you get is to your liking. Or you could chase the rainbow and see where it leads to. Hahaha. The rabbit hole is deep.

I want to try more natural stones but many are too expensive. I have avoided single stone honing to avoid inconsistency with slurries. I would like to try some stones that leave a very keen edge with just water at the end of my progression but pricing and variety make it difficult, so pastes get me results more easily.

 

[Dick peck]

Check out Griffith shaving goods. And natural wet stone company. You may find something affordable and good. I did .

 

[Gamma]

Everything matters - but it's a question of the degree to which it matters. There is most definitely a difference between a croxed edge that was initially a coti edge, and one that was honed to, say - 5k synth and then hit on crox. Does the difference matter, can you qualify or quantify the difference, etc? Who knows, maybe yes maybe no. It also matters whether or not you are talking about 3 passes or 30 passes on the paste. And before anyone says that no one does that many passes on pastes, I've been known to put in over 100 laps on diamond pastes.
When I am dialed into my razor, then the blade's geometry, including subtle changes and variations due to different honings, are noticeable.
Personally, I would prefer to use pastes at 5k... not after 8k. I am speaking of JIS rated stones. While I'm here - 3 µm is more like 5k JIS, not 8k JIS.
Anyway, to me - a crox edge (or whatever) is a crox edge but not all crox edges are created equally.

 

[buca3152]

100 laps on diamond paste or sprays is not anything I could ever shave with. I think pastes work. I also think that learning the stones well will eliminate the need for them.

 

[eKretz]

Certainly some characteristics of the earlier edge can be present after pasted stropping. It depends how far you go with the pasted stropping. If you hone up a razor on a stone then do a very few strokes on the pasted strop, a considerable amount of the original edge's characteristics will likely remain. If, on the other hand, many strokes on the pasted strop are made, far less of the original edge's characteristics should be expected to remain. It's a matter of degree, I should think.

So with few strokes or less aggressive abrasive on a pasted strop, I should think it would definitely be possible to feel the difference between edges honed on different stones even if both were hit with a pasted strop afterwards for a small amount of strokes, but many would tend to obliterate the differences between the edges.

 

[Jnatcat]

@eKretz I aggree on that, i have played around with a .5 CrOx crayon and also .25 diamond paste, the CrOX I got from SRD who was getting it from Mastro Livi but no longer does SRD carry it, the .25 diamond paste can be had here: Sharpening Pastes and it's a wonderful easy to use paste that is not greasy and dries to a even finish on leather, when I used it I would go from .25 to .5 and i know this sounds counter productive but I found out that the .25 was very keen as in to keen and left me with a harsh edge so I then would foillow up with about twice as many passes with the .5 CrOx and this softened the .25 edge, it took some testing as I started with lots of laps and ended up with a happy medium of 5-7 light passes with the .25 and 10-15 of the .5 and under the loupe the JNAT edge remained but had the keeness kicked up several notches, when I did more passes you could slowly see the JNAT edge fade as the edge became more polished and that sandblasted edge slowly disappeared.

 

[Doc226]

No easy answers here but I believe the end is the end.

If you end with crox, then you have a crox edge, this of course depends on what the crox is used on. On a flat medium (blast) I think you keep more of the original edge while on a flexible medium you lose it faster.

A lot of guys use it after cuticles when they have trouble maxing out the keenness of the coticule, I think a few laps of it help for sure, but after how many laps on the crox do you still have a coticule edge? I don't know.

What I do think is if you are going to finish on crox or diamond or any other paste, do not waste your time doing a complicated progression (JNATs with nagura for example), synthetics would work just fine, just make sure the work of the previous stone is done before moving up.

 

[Jim cunningham]

Kinda like my, "Whose edge is this?" question: If Bill hones one of my razors on one of his jnats, and I love it for 5 or 6 shaves, then do a touch up with my Naniwa 12k, do I have Bill's jnat edge, or a synth?

Synthetic

 

[David]

Whoa.

 

[SliceOfLife]

If you're doing stones the way most people would consider right... then no, previous stone doesn't matter. Now there's definitely a class of razor honing where you do deliberately partially finish on one hone to leave characteristics of previous hones on there. I believe the most easy to understand example of this would be going coticule to arkansas and similar techniques... but those are in my opinion pretty specialist techniques that are more for experimenting when you've confident/comfortable honing, not something to worry about for beginners.

Pastes are a bit different in that they change blade geometry quite a bit differently than hones do... so I'll leave that to the folks who regularly use pastes. I would say that investing in a very good quality, high end natural only to use a paste afterwords seems silly to me... a good synthetic might be justifiable for speed/efficiency reasons.

 

[RayClem]

Not too long ago, I purchased a "Modern Thuringian" hone from Timbertools. It was a decent dhone, probably producing an edge similar to a 10K synthetic. However, I normally like finishing at even finer grit levels: Greek Vermio, Zulu Grey, Shapton 16K or Suehiro G20K. I was able to shave off of the M odern Thuringian, but only after spending about 10 minutes on a pasted CrOx strop followed 0.5, 0.25, and .01 micron CBN pasted strops. With my finer stones, I can skip the CrOx altogether and do about 20 laps each on the CBN strops.

My conclusion is that if your finishing hone is not as good as it might be, you can compensate with pasted strops, but having a great finishing hone makes the job much easier.