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- #41
"I once was lost
But now I'm found
Was blind, but now I see"
Amazing Grace
It's all very well to have "The Method" and apply a known honing/stropping technique to a razor, and meet with success. That'll do, if you just want to shave. But what if you are curious? There's a guy who has something called the Ax Method, and later something much simpler, called the Ax2 method, or something like that, and what struck me the most was that the dude had a 300 power microscope, so he could really tell what was going on with his edges. That lit a fire in me, to be able to see what my edges were really doing. So I got a microscope.
At first, I was looking at "digital microscopes," until I finally realized that they were a rank fraud. I had wondered why my cheap digital microscope exposed much less than my cheap lighted 12X loupe, and finally I discovered the answer: those things magnify by making the pixels bigger. No serious optics needed.
At least I knew that magnification is utterly dependent on lighting. So I got one with a blazing bright ring light. Couldn't quite find a 300X that would suit, but settled for a 180X, with zoom. Zoom is really useful; you don't always need the max magnification, and when you use the max magnification, any movement or vibration is a huge deal. It's great to be able to zoom out and have a more relaxed experience, if you don't need the closest view.
It turns out that my razor honing game is less in need of help than my knife sharpening game, which was a shock, but not one that is on topic here. So instead I'll share some microscope pictures of the razor I shaved with yesterday, then stropped on 0.1 micron balsa.
View attachment 1199518
The edge, somewhere in the middle. This seems like a happy situation.
The toe. The edge doesn't get as far as I thought. I'm going to have to shave-test this consciously, to see whether it is an issue I need to correct.
The heel, on the other hand, seems sound.
Being able to see stuff like this makes me very happy, and it will be even more so when examining edges that did not produce a good shave, as this one did. I don't know how I'd explain that to a normal person, though.
But now I'm found
Was blind, but now I see"
Amazing Grace
It's all very well to have "The Method" and apply a known honing/stropping technique to a razor, and meet with success. That'll do, if you just want to shave. But what if you are curious? There's a guy who has something called the Ax Method, and later something much simpler, called the Ax2 method, or something like that, and what struck me the most was that the dude had a 300 power microscope, so he could really tell what was going on with his edges. That lit a fire in me, to be able to see what my edges were really doing. So I got a microscope.
At first, I was looking at "digital microscopes," until I finally realized that they were a rank fraud. I had wondered why my cheap digital microscope exposed much less than my cheap lighted 12X loupe, and finally I discovered the answer: those things magnify by making the pixels bigger. No serious optics needed.
At least I knew that magnification is utterly dependent on lighting. So I got one with a blazing bright ring light. Couldn't quite find a 300X that would suit, but settled for a 180X, with zoom. Zoom is really useful; you don't always need the max magnification, and when you use the max magnification, any movement or vibration is a huge deal. It's great to be able to zoom out and have a more relaxed experience, if you don't need the closest view.
It turns out that my razor honing game is less in need of help than my knife sharpening game, which was a shock, but not one that is on topic here. So instead I'll share some microscope pictures of the razor I shaved with yesterday, then stropped on 0.1 micron balsa.
View attachment 1199518
The edge, somewhere in the middle. This seems like a happy situation.
The toe. The edge doesn't get as far as I thought. I'm going to have to shave-test this consciously, to see whether it is an issue I need to correct.
The heel, on the other hand, seems sound.
Being able to see stuff like this makes me very happy, and it will be even more so when examining edges that did not produce a good shave, as this one did. I don't know how I'd explain that to a normal person, though.
