Having time on my hands today as I stay at home as advised, I decided on a little honing and maintenance to kill an hour so I got set up on the kitchen table and put my glasses on.
I decided to use metal polish to try to clean up my Suredge, my ELSINE and my Thomas Turner razors. The Suredge and ELSINE are both brilliant shavers but came to me a bit rough around the edges so I wanted to clean them up if possible and the Turner had rusted a while back and I’d never got it quite how it used to be.
Id also bought a small Welsh slate stone ages ago and tried it but couldn’t really use it back then as I was very new to honing and I’d dulled my 2 Gold dollars trying to learn to use it so today I thought I’d try to put a decent edge on Gold Dollar B with that. I lapped it on a sandpaper backed tile and gave it a try. I also lapped my Naniwa 12k while I was at it though not for use today.
The stone is a purple/grey slate of only about 6 inches x 1 1/2 inches so a bit tricky to use but I definitely felt more comfortable using it today than last time. I wet it and gave it around 50 laps with the last 20 being very light. I’m very interested to see how this shaves tomorrow, my hope is that it’ll be smooth like a coticule edge someone once sent me.
Next I gave the ELSINE, Suredge and Turner a light metal polish hoping they’d come up a bit and they did but not by any massive amount.
I think any further polishing improvements will need sandpaper or a dremmel although I’ve never tried removing deep rusting or staining before.
Next I took them to my acrylic block and lapping films to bring up the edges.
I did 20 laps on each razor using green film at around 30u 1.5k, blue at 9u 4K , pink at 3u 8k, light green at 1u 10k and white at 0.3u 12k.
The first 10 laps were with some pressure and the last 10 with hardly any.
I then stropped all 4 razors 40x on linen then around 100 each on leather.
The whole job took me a pleasant hour and I’ve now got 4 freshly honed razors to try out this week but the one I’m looking forward to using most is the Welsh slate edge as I want to see if my honing skills have improved enough to be able to use that and im interested to see how my face likes a natural stone edge.
I decided to use metal polish to try to clean up my Suredge, my ELSINE and my Thomas Turner razors. The Suredge and ELSINE are both brilliant shavers but came to me a bit rough around the edges so I wanted to clean them up if possible and the Turner had rusted a while back and I’d never got it quite how it used to be.
Id also bought a small Welsh slate stone ages ago and tried it but couldn’t really use it back then as I was very new to honing and I’d dulled my 2 Gold dollars trying to learn to use it so today I thought I’d try to put a decent edge on Gold Dollar B with that. I lapped it on a sandpaper backed tile and gave it a try. I also lapped my Naniwa 12k while I was at it though not for use today.
The stone is a purple/grey slate of only about 6 inches x 1 1/2 inches so a bit tricky to use but I definitely felt more comfortable using it today than last time. I wet it and gave it around 50 laps with the last 20 being very light. I’m very interested to see how this shaves tomorrow, my hope is that it’ll be smooth like a coticule edge someone once sent me.
Next I gave the ELSINE, Suredge and Turner a light metal polish hoping they’d come up a bit and they did but not by any massive amount.
I think any further polishing improvements will need sandpaper or a dremmel although I’ve never tried removing deep rusting or staining before.
Next I took them to my acrylic block and lapping films to bring up the edges.
I did 20 laps on each razor using green film at around 30u 1.5k, blue at 9u 4K , pink at 3u 8k, light green at 1u 10k and white at 0.3u 12k.
The first 10 laps were with some pressure and the last 10 with hardly any.
I then stropped all 4 razors 40x on linen then around 100 each on leather.
The whole job took me a pleasant hour and I’ve now got 4 freshly honed razors to try out this week but the one I’m looking forward to using most is the Welsh slate edge as I want to see if my honing skills have improved enough to be able to use that and im interested to see how my face likes a natural stone edge.
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