Little teeth and stroping

[bluefoxicy]

It had to happen eventually.

I took a close look at my blade. 3 inches from my face close.

The edge was a mess, a little jagged, with a few small gaps.

To put this into perspective, the blade is 3 inches long; the edge detail I'm seeing is on the order of thousands of little spikes and dips. When I say "small gaps" I mean small.

So, I stroped the blade 60 times, properly, and re-examined the edge.

WOW that looks better O_O It's almost smooth, but after a good several seconds I started to see minor detail. Very organized minor detail.

My dilemma though: There's a tiny, tiny gap in the center that I can't strop out. One of the teeth seems missing. What do I make of this? Aside from that, everything's at the same height (small parts of the edge seemed dipped, possibly folded over but I can't quite see that much detail...yet) and it shaves me better than it did a while ago.

 

[leighton]

Are you seeing those with a bare eye? Eye loupe? Microscope? Can't exactly understand what your seeing unless we know what magnification. Should help you get more responses.

 

[mparker762]

It had to happen eventually.

I took a close look at my blade. 3 inches from my face close.

The edge was a mess, a little jagged, with a few small gaps.

To put this into perspective, the blade is 3 inches long; the edge detail I'm seeing is on the order of thousands of little spikes and dips. When I say "small gaps" I mean small.

So, I stroped the blade 60 times, properly, and re-examined the edge.

WOW that looks better O_O It's almost smooth, but after a good several seconds I started to see minor detail. Very organized minor detail.

My dilemma though: There's a tiny, tiny gap in the center that I can't strop out. One of the teeth seems missing. What do I make of this? Aside from that, everything's at the same height (small parts of the edge seemed dipped, possibly folded over but I can't quite see that much detail...yet) and it shaves me better than it did a while ago.

That's what I see on my razors that have seen a lot of shaves. I think it's just accumulated mechanical wear. I only see this on my long-term razors - the ones that have a lot of shaves on them (75+); if the razor goes dull sooner than that I don't see this sort of visual decline, and I interpret this to mean that something other than mechanical stress caused them to get dull, either microscopic corrosion, bad stropping or a slightly inadequate bevel or some such. At some point the remaining little bits will follow their brothers in breaking off, and you'll need to give it a touch up on a barber hone or comparable stone or pasted strop. It's surprising how few strokes it takes to refresh an edge that looks so bad, but 4-5 strokes on a barber hone usually does the trick. There's no point touching it up before it fails; like you I find that these edges still shave very well, and I've got a couple of razors that started showing these sorts of signs 50+ shaves ago. They're gradually looking more microchipped as the months go by, and stropping isn't quite bringing them all the way back, but they're still shaving very well, and may go another few months before needing their first touch-up.

BTW the condition of your edge is probably not as bad as it looks, because what you're mostly seeing are the reflections off the steel and that causes all sorts of optical illusions because the steel is so perfectly polished, making even minor irregularities look like major flaws. Microscopic bits that happen to be angled to reflect light perfectly into your eye will be so bright that it looks huge to the naked eye, and bits that are angled to reflect light elsewhere appear to be missing. You can actually see variations on the edge with the naked eye that are quite small even at 100x, by using these optical effects to your advantage. A bright point light source (e.g. sun) helps tremendously.

 

[bluefoxicy]

Are you seeing those with a bare eye? Eye loupe? Microscope? Can't exactly understand what your seeing unless we know what magnification. Should help you get more responses.

Bare eye. I just kept looking until I could see detail. It actually kinda hurt.

 

[gurana]

Bare eye. I just kept looking until I could see detail. It actually kinda hurt.

You'll go blind if you don't stop that.

 

[barracudamagoo]

That's what my mom always told me!

 

[gurana]

That's what my mom always told me!

FINALLY! I was waiting for somebody to run with this set-up. Jeesch guys, get with the program.