hello i recently picked up straight razor shaving after dabbling with my shavette on and off. was mainly a de shaver. my first razor was a zy stainless that i ordered from ebay i took it straight out of the box and did my first shave 3 passes noticed it was a little lacking in the sharpness department(major razor burn) but just loved something about shaving with the straight so i then ordered a boker king cutter 5/8 and shaved with that out of the box... the results were actualy worse then the zy..... i kinda knew that going in but wanted to test it anyway. so i ordered a 12k naniwa to compliment my already diverse stone collection that i have from sharpening knives. i took the boker through 1000,3000,5000,8000,12000 and did the treetoping test and was quite disapointed at this point because it wouldnt even pick up a hair.... untill i hit the leather then wow it realy popped i will be waiting cple more days to test shave with it hope it works