Gold dollar 66 factory edge repair?

[Friedramen]

So everytime I buy gold dollars they often come with a well roughed up edge. I've seen some people (caleb m) take it to a diamond plate with half strokes while lifting the spine slightly do to cut a 'fresh' bevel (I think this is a form of breadknifing). Do any of you guys do that? Or do you just take the razor to a plate or stone and do regular half strokes with spine and edge touching like normal? Do you think it even matters? Have you found you like one way over the other? Do you do something completely different than either of these? Thanks

 

[psfred]

Gold Dollars aren't finished at the factory, it's necessary to establish a bevel. How much work this takes depends on the individual razor. Some are pretty clean and straight and a few passes will get a bevel established, some are poorly ground, warped, or have enough damage to the edge that it will take a while.

Use whatever procedure you would like, there is plenty of steel to work with. I tend to use a diamond plate personally, takes forever on most of them otherwise. Spine leading strokes with x-strokes if needed until it has a bevel.

 

[Robini]

The GD razors I have purchased both had very bad geometry issues. I decided to fix that first as I purchased them to practice honing when I started. To do this, I taped the bevel and worked the spine on the diamond plate. Once the geometry issues were remedied, I started my honing progression. After this was complete, the GD shaved like a champ! I do not recommend this on any razor of value!

 

[Slash McCoy]

So everytime I buy gold dollars they often come with a well roughed up edge. I've seen some people (caleb m) take it to a diamond plate with half strokes while lifting the spine slightly do to cut a 'fresh' bevel (I think this is a form of breadknifing). Do any of you guys do that? Or do you just take the razor to a plate or stone and do regular half strokes with spine and edge touching like normal? Do you think it even matters? Have you found you like one way over the other? Do you do something completely different than either of these? Thanks

Me? Absolutely not. The spine is not too thin. It is too THICK. When steel is taken from the edge is a great opportunity to also take steel from the spine. I wail on it with coarse sandpaper glued to acrylic until there is a proper bevel. I usually do sets of 100 circle/oval strokes until I start detecting a burr. Then I progress upward in grit and continue until by the 1000 grit range a bevel appears on both sides in turn. Then, after honing the final burr off, a bevel has been set and verified.

If you really want to do it right, you will do as Robini mentioned... deliberately focus on thinning the spine so that the bevel angle is reduced. Another good idea is to remove the heel along with the stabilizer, leaving a thumb notch. Yet another improvement is to thin the shank and fair it into the blade so that the spine is the thickest part of the razor. This ensures that there is no thick shank to ride up on the hone. Finally, pushing the hollowgrind further up into the spine will help the razor to wear normally, and enable you to easily round the spine profile and if it is a big deal to you, make it appear that the razor was made to shave and not made to a sub $4 price point. That's a lot of work just to make a $4 razor shave. We don't do it because it is a good idea. We do it because we can. If you want to be practical, for another $20 or so, start off with a razor that doesn't require such drastic measures to be a great shaver. Or just hone that GD and be satisfied with the shave you get. But the last thing you want to do is to avoid honing the spine and making it worse.