What's new

Honing Blues

Currently up to shave number 10 with a straight and still haven't experienced a sharp razor - I gave up on the last three shaves after half a pass and finished with a DE.

Latest episode in my honing saga was yesterday - I mentioned in previous posts on a couple of threads that I bought a "shave ready" Gold Dollar 66 and am stuffing about with it, trying to learn the dark arts of honing. A guy on one of the FaceBook pages, showed me a couple of pictures of his GD66 and how you modify the toe and heel by rounding them off to make it sit better on the stone. So I got out the Dremel and away I went. No problems and it didn't look too bad either.

Next step was the bevel - I have read the compendium on the burr method but find it rather confusing. Anyway, I had a go, but couldn't get a burr happening - this was with a 1k Shapton ceramic. I did follow one bit of advice and coloured the edge with a texta. This was really useful - the first couple of passes wore away the black and I could see that bits of the heel and toe were untouched. I kept doing passes until the whole of the edge was shiny. Basically, up and down on one side - 60 passes, then 60 on the other side, 50 and 50, 40 and 40 etc all the way down to 1 pass. Then about 10 x-strokes and repeated a few times over. Using my loupe I could see that it all looked even and it did shave arm hair. Was the bevel set? Absolutely no idea, how do you tell? All I could do was assume it was.

So I proceeded with the progression. I have a Norton 4000/8000. Starting with the 4k I could see the edge getting shinier, however, a bit on side of the toe and the other side of the heel didn't seem to be getting the attention that the rest of the edge was. Was this honing technique, a bent razor, or the stones? How do you tell? I kept going until all the scratches from the 1k were gone and eventually the heel and toe spots were consistent with the rest - all up, a couple of hundred passes.

Same deal with the 8k and then the 12k, another Shapton ceramic. By this time you could see that the edge now had a mirror finish. I did keep testing it on my arm and it did seem to tree top, however as with the actual shaving, I have never experienced a really sharp razor, so nothing to gauge it with. I have found that tree topping isn't a very good test anyway, as arm hair is a lot thinner than whiskers. After a few hours of honing I felt that it was ready to test with a shave.

How did it go in bathroom? Basically, it wouldn't shave - you had to force it through the whiskers and I gave up after half a pass because I was scared it would bog down and suddenly jump free and cut myself.

As I mentioned in another thread, I am getting so disillusioned with the whole thing. I don't really want to spend 6 months learning to hone just to get a half decent shave. It's frustrating that I can't get a shave ready razor. I have sent a Bengall off to a honer in the UK, but it took the post 4 weeks to get there from Australia, due to everything being slow because of the virus. It's now on it's way back but goodness knows how long that will take.

Absolutely no idea of what I am doing wrong and why I can't get it sharp enough to shave with. I think some of it has to do with being able to tell when the honing is ready to go onto the next stage and testing techniques. Cutting arm hair means nothing, and as many have said, your pocket knife can do that. I have seen thumbnail and thumb pad tests on YouTube but no idea of what they are doing and they don't tell you. I have seen stuff about cutting up tomatoes but that's just crazy - surely they can't be serious. My kitchen knives will do that, you know those Wiltshire knives in the self sharpening scabbard?

Maybe there is a step missing with getting your razor sharp enough to shave with - I don't know, everything seems to be there. Starting to understand why you can't buy a shave ready razor, and why there is nobody in this country that you can send your razor to, it's just to difficult to master.

Yeh, I know a lot of people are going to disagree with this and I am happy to be proven wrong, but it's going to be difficult!

cheers
Andrew
 
OK Andrew ~ your story reminds me of mine. I'd like to relate to you how I got through those early frustrations of learning to hone and shave with a straight. You might not have the resources I had but maybe I can give you a few ideas to jump start you again. It sounds like you did a lot of work... just like I did without the payoff at the end of the day.

Here are a few suggestions. Forgive my scattered thoughts as I am not good at linear thinking. So in no particular order...

~ Get several inexpensive straight razors and have them honed up by an expert. They could be several Gold Dollars or do what I did and buy some inexpensive vintage razors with tough steel in them. Get a little rotation going and take the pressure off having to learn how to hone. It was too much pressure for me in the beginning to try and learn shaving and honing at the same time. I was ruining edges on my strop and my hone constantly. I wanted to get away from practicing honing on the razor I needed to shave with. Get a few expertly sharpened razors and rotate them. A few guys here GAVE me razors to borrow and even sharpened them for free till I got the hang of it.

I took one or two of those expertly sharpened razors and learned quickly what a great hanging hair test was. It helped me to be able to judge my own edges really well. I never put my fingers or thumbs on an edge ~ I'm a musician and don't want to risk a cut there but I know it works for some people. The cherry tomato test is a good one for judging bevel set. The idea is to just rest the razor on the tomato and maybe move it a hair with no downward pressure. The razor should sink right in if the bevel is set.

I'm guessing if you put out the call here on B&B for an expert honer in Australia that one is bound to show up. There was a guy in Australia I used to bid against for the same razors so I know at least one person in Australia knows their honing business.

~ Use one razor to experiment on for stropping. It is critically important to learn how to strop and maintain your edges as soon as you can. The honing can wait. This stropping business took me the longest to learn. Videos were useless to me. They were all too fast and there is no way one can learn the proper technique and pressures from a video. Go very slowly, keep the strop tight, and the spine against the leather at all times. After you shave with your first well honed razor go for extremely light, slow movements on the strop. Move the edge on the leather like you are lightly polishing the wings of a steel butterfly (thank you Steve). You have to learn this step to keep those edges going.

~ I had a few gold dollars that I experimented with "on the side". I spent evenings and weekends honing and stropping and mostly failing for months but made little break throughs here and there, usually by accident. I wrote everything down in a honing journal so that when I did do something right I could go back and reference it. I never tried more than one new movement or technique at a time. No use in trying three things when one was good and the other 2 ruined the edge.

~ Learn how to shave as gently as possible. I ruined edges on my face by shaving aggressively. Angles were too steep and I was using too much pressure. I needed to lighten up! Between my poor stropping and aggressive shaving techniques my razors were good for 2 shaves max in the start.

I hope this helps you a bit and maybe gave you some ideas.

Does anyone know any great honers in Australia that can help Andrew out?

PS - I have a gold dollar I'd be happy to send you. It was the one I started on 10 years ago and its a great shaver. PM me your address and I'll send it out to you.
 
Thanks njnjt

What you say makes a lot of sense - I don't expect to learn to hone in a couple of weeks. Starting to realise it's a lot longer journey than that and needs lots and lots of practice. You're a musician? I play highland pipes, guitar, whistle and trying to learn the ukulele so haven't really got the hours to spend learning a new skill such as honing. Plus there are a whole host of boat projects piling up in my garage and on my boat requiring my time. I understand the thumb pad thing, I don't want any injuries from wiggling my thumb on a blade, even a crap edge like mine!

I know everyone says that I should just get a sharp razor first and learn to shave, but that's the whole problem - I just can't go out and get one! Not in this country anyway. However, I have found a honer in England, and as mentioned, Grandad's Bengall is in the post on the way back. Hopefully, I will get a couple of razors going that way. I bought half a dozen vintage ones of Fleabay but most are bent and will most likely only get one or two out of them that will be any good. But that's OK - I wouldn't mind having 4 or 5 that I can turn over and get touched up when needed, but England is a long way away from Australia, and as I mentioned the time in the post at the moment is astronomical. I know there are people in Australia that can hone, but they are 1000's of miles away from where I live, so I might as well send them overseas for honing.

So, I am spending hours trying to hone with no luck. As an amateur musician myself, I know the journey of lots and lots of practice, but you do need tuition. An instrument such as the Great Highland Bagpipe is impossible to learn without tuition - Youtube won't be of much use like it would with a guitar. Plus hours and hours of practice on the rudiments, playing the instrument, learning tunes etc It's not even easy for me with 40+ years of experience and a lot of it at high levels.

I know a lot of this sounds like I am not really fair dinkum about learning to hone, but it's not a rabbit hole I want to dive into. Time and $ is the main reason. I am thankful for the advice from this forum but will keep plugging away at the stones. I have gotten this far and will keep going with that Gold Dollar until the cutting edge meets the spine, then get another one!

cheers
 
I will share with you how I learned from 1 thread on another forum. I hope this ok per forum rules. It’s a long thread where some senior guys walked a new guy through the process. You should read it all. This plus a lot of practice allows me to shave off my own honing.

LINK

For me, the key technique involves looking straight down on the bevel with a lit magnifier. I think he begins to show this on post 42. Any white line showing up on the very edge of the bevel is a problem.

I use a cheap led jewelers loop like one of these. Make sure to have extra batteries, because when the led begins to dim, this won't work.
06748668-A96B-493E-B08C-B2807555ED15.jpeg


Another helpful technique is marking the blade edge with a sharpie to see if you are honing the full blade edge.

Good luck.
 
Do a marker test or use a loupe like posted but honestly all the tools in the world don’t matter and it comes down to three simple words my mentored drilled into my head “ Hone, Shave, Repeat ”

As far as the bevel being even it does not matter if it’s wider on one end or the other or even in the middle as this comes down to the grind, you could spend countless hours trying to even out a bevel and you may do this but it will be at the expense of removing a lot of steel, my suggestion is don’t use a GD unless the geometry has already been corrected you will end up beating you head against the wall so get a decent razor like a Boker or similar for not a lot and then have it honed by someone that knows how to hone as this will give you a good idea on what a proper edge should be like then work on shave technique and stropping and when the edge starts to fail take it to a 12k to refresh and if that does not work then go down to a 8k, also work backwards on a previous shave ready edge
 
It can take a while to learn to do all this but it's mainly a matter of getting it to work once and then you know what a sharp edge feels like and how it shaves.

Don't waste your time moving on from the 1k stage unless it cuts hair at that stage. If that doesn't work for you then do the tomato test or get a razor that you know is sharp and do the finger nail test and don't move on from the 1k until yours can do that.

The take away is you have to have some kind of test that you understand as a way of comparison. Otherwise you will just hone away for hours and nothing will happen.

It doesn't actually take all that long on the 1k. Many people while learning actually get a set bevel, don't realize it and continue honing and then they lose the bevel. You have to know when to stop.

Once you do have a sharp bevel set, it also doesn't take long to move from the 1k to 4k to 8k to finishing hone.

When you're new you may also have a sharp edge and then being killing it by your stropping. There's so many variables when you are new that it can be frustrating. Once you end up with an edge you can shave with (even if it's not perfect) a light will come on as to how you got there. Just keep doing that.

It's really helpful however to have a sharp razor that someone else did and don't use that to practice honing with. Don't even strop it until you have shaved with it a couple of times so you know what a sharp razor feels like and you know you didn't mess it up with your stropping.
 
Top Bottom