First honing questions

[rhgg2]

Continued the progression with 6k and 10k. Doing the heel and toe separately actually makes it much easier to gauge your progress as the striations from the last grit remain visible there while you are honing the rest.

Also, I revisited the saw that in hand honing is easier for beginners, which I had been doing thus far, and tried switching to bench honing. I am amazed how much easier I find it. My water doesn't constantly fall off, I'm not fighting my wobbly off hand, the roll is way easier to do smoothly, and my stones no longer look like someone murdered a razor on them when I'm done.

I LOVE putting the 6k between the 3k and the 10k. It feels much easier to know when you're done, and the results just look nicer. Whether they are nicer - well that will have to wait until after the 0.85u finisher and test shave tomorrow.

 

[lightfoot]

As a side note here’s a few ideas in terms of verifying a set bevel at the beginning:

-Shaves arm hair very easy at skin-level

-Resistance while drawing across the thumb nail

-Tries to sink into the thumb pad (this takes practice to read)

-Easily cuts into a thin-skinned fruit

-Some may use a piece of news paper for a slice check though not widely used

I would encourage anyone new to try a combination of these checks in the beginning until you find one that gives you the best verification

 

[JPO]

If your stone

Continued the progression with 6k and 10k. Doing the heel and toe separately actually makes it much easier to gauge your progress as the striations from the last grit remain visible there while you are honing the rest.

Also, I revisited the saw that in hand honing is easier for beginners, which I had been doing thus far, and tried switching to bench honing. I am amazed how much easier I find it. My water doesn't constantly fall off, I'm not fighting my wobbly off hand, the roll is way easier to do smoothly, and my stones no longer look like someone murdered a razor on them when I'm done.

I LOVE putting the 6k between the 3k and the 10k. It feels much easier to know when you're done, and the results just look nicer. Whether they are nicer - well that will have to wait until after the 0.85u finisher and test shave tomorrow.

If your stones looks like there have been a drag racing event, you are using too much pressure. These shapton stone will cut fast even with light pressure.
If you are applying too much pressure at the spine you might also remove material at a faster rate on the spine then at the bevel. If that is the case it will be like swimming upstream.

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

And black swarf is abrasive and can form a plaque like surface that your edge is banging against with each lap, at the least preventing the bevel from making full contact with the stone. The Black swarf is apparent on Shaptons and more so on Naniwia Super Stones.

Once you have nice bevels cut, re-lap and wash your stone and do your finish X laps on a clean stone, to rehabilitate the edge and squeak the most from each stone. It should only take a few finish laps to bring the bevels back to meeting fully, maxing the performance from each stone.

Stropping on linen will also clean the bevels and remove any micro burrs so that your finish laps are making full contact on the stone.

 

[rhgg2]

Thanks, both. Definitely a bit too much pressure - when I lapped afterwards I had a small dish in the middle. I flatten until 10 laps clears the gridlines but after honing on the 1k and 3k I needed another 6-7 laps to clear the middle back to flat the first time. Fortunately I have been cleaning the stone during honing and stropping on linen between stones and sometimes during honing on each stone.

The pressure seems not to have been overly on the spine. I am checking against my photo reference of how it looked before the last round of honing and the spine wear seems pretty unchanged.

A lot of it is actually down to trying to hand hone. The glass stones are thin enough that grasped on the edges and even flat on the palm seem a little unsafe to me. So I had been forming a kind of plinth with the knuckles of my off hand and balancing the stone on that. I think this obviates the key advantage of hand honing which is getting the muscles of both arms involved. In fact it is a slightly unstable support.

This, in turn, means that the water on the stone tends to fall off, which in turn means that (1) there is not enough water to hold the swarf in suspension and it collects on the stone face (2) there is too much friction between the blade and the stone and needless pressure is required to overcome it.

Moreover, honing around the radius of the heel and toe, which requires lift, is much harder to judge on an unstable support, and the pressure on a smaller area of the edge is harder to manage. This in turn led to a lot of race tracks!

Now on the bench there was almost no swarf left on the 6k and 10k after honing, such that I can get it back to clean with my fingers. This seems like progress!

 

[rhgg2]

Did the 0.85 G7 yesterday. A 1.5" hone is at the limits of my meagre abilities at present. Doing blending strokes is a challenge!

I then shaved with it, once yesterday and once today, stropping on leather for 60 laps before and after. Yesterday was acceptable, very comfortable but not extremely keen. Today was as comfortable and significantly sharper, better than I ever got from film. I have good reason to believe that tomorrow it will be a tiny bit sharper still and will then plateau there, because this is exactly how it went with the previous razor I honed on these stones, my (already shaving nicely) 9/16 Kropp.

I am guessing I must be raising some kind of very fine burr which only clear after a few shaves and rounds of stropping. So I guess more strokes on the finisher is not the answer. Should I add some pull strokes, or joint the edge before finishing on each stone? Maybe a few strokes on a 0.5 pasted balsa strop before ending on the finisher?

 

[JPO]

So I guess more strokes on the finisher is not the answer. Should I add some pull strokes, or joint the edge before finishing on each stone? Maybe a few strokes on a 0.5 pasted balsa strop before ending on the finisher?

How many strokes are you doing in the 0.85 g7?
I do around 5-7. If you do allot more then ten you are probably doing too much.
If you are using your 6k before this stone, this stone shouldn't create a burr with edge leading strokes.
So, I see no point in jointing or using balsa before the g7 stone.
If you are getting edge issues on your g7, it might help to do 5-10 strokes on the g7, then do a few strokes on the balsa. After this you can do 5 really light strokes on the g7 as a finisher.
This stone cuts really fast. So, you can quickly do too much.
Edge jointing is a delicate thing. If you do it on a hard glass stone you are likely setting the edge further back then you need to, and you should not need to.

 

[rhgg2]

Thanks! I wasn't counting but I definitely did more than 10 on the G7. So probably that would be it.

I am still getting used to what the scratch patterns look like after each of these stones. After the 10k, the finish is mirror if viewed from my usual viewing angles under the loupe. But with the bevel side-lit there is a "secret scratch pattern" with a bunch of striations still visible. I had thought that this might be what would be removed by the 0.85. In fact I don't think there was very much observable difference in the bevel at 10x magnification. (Probably these secret scratches should have been removed by more careful honing earlier on.) So maybe I just count laps on the finisher for now.

Although: I also started getting a sort of rubbery stop-start drag on both the 10k and the 0.85 at some point in the process, as if the razor were passing over interspersed high and low friction patches. Applying less pressure or adding more water didn't fix this, though a slight torque into the edge did. Is this saying "you're done", or just another awful technique error?

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

You want to fully set the bevels with the bevel setter, whatever grit that is. The bevels are fully set when they are ground flat, (even stria pattern) at the correct bevel angle and meeting fully from heel to toe. (No shiny reflections, when looking straight down on the edge).

Then you just need to remove all the bevel setting stria with the Transition stone, where you remove all the deep bevel setting stria and replace it with an even stria pattern from the transition stone, (transition from grinding to polishing). Again, look straight down on the edge.

Then it is just a matter of polishing the bevels with finer grits to refine/straighten the edge.

If you find deep stria that was missed, it is often easier to drop down a grit and remove the stria rather than fight it and try to use more pressure or laps to remove deep stria with a high grit. Do not rush a progression, it takes, what it takes.

Yes, some aggressive finishers can create a burr if too many laps or too much pressure is used. But it is not a big deal.

Just joint the edge lightly (one or two weight of the blade strokes) on the finish stone and some light X strokes should bring the bevels back to meeting fully. It will also make a stronger edge.

Once the bevels have been ground flat and to the correct angle, and you remove a few microns of the edge by jointing, you only need to remove a few microns from the bevels to get them to meet again.

Stropping on linen or paste can help clean up the edge, prior to the final finish laps. When you feel you are done, look straight down on the edge with magnification. If you see any shiny spots, joint the edge again and re-set the bevels to bring them back to meeting.

It is common for new honers to not remove ALL the deep bevel setting stria and it surfaces later in the progression. You will improve your honing by perfecting each stone in the progression.

Sounds like you are very close.

The rubbery start/stop could be stiction, where the bevel becomes super flat and sticks to the stone, or it could be you are burning through your tape, if using tape, or a hair on the stone.

If stiction, it means that part of the bevel is flat, not necessarily the whole bevel is/are flat or meeting fully.

 

[JPO]

Thanks! I wasn't counting but I definitely did more than 10 on the G7. So probably that would be it.

I am still getting used to what the scratch patterns look like after each of these stones. After the 10k, the finish is mirror if viewed from my usual viewing angles under the loupe. But with the bevel side-lit there is a "secret scratch pattern" with a bunch of striations still visible. I had thought that this might be what would be removed by the 0.85. In fact I don't think there was very much observable difference in the bevel at 10x magnification. (Probably these secret scratches should have been removed by more careful honing earlier on.) So maybe I just count laps on the finisher for now.

Although: I also started getting a sort of rubbery stop-start drag on both the 10k and the 0.85 at some point in the process, as if the razor were passing over interspersed high and low friction patches. Applying less pressure or adding more water didn't fix this, though a slight torque into the edge did. Is this saying "you're done", or just another awful technique error?

In my experience these stones work best with a freshly lapped surface. I don't go any lower then an 600 atoma on my stones. If the surface gets too polished they have a tendancy to generate too much resistance before the edge is ready to move to the next grit.
I also don't like to have too much water on the surface. Wet, but not a pool of water.

 

[rhgg2]

A quick update. After another shave I determined that the edge had plateaued about as good as it was going to get, and that this was below what I was hoping for.

So I ran the whole progression again from 3k. I realised I had been removing the previous stones striations only seen from the bevel's most favourable aspect, while from other viewing angles a whole bevy of scratches remained.

So this time I concentrated hard on doing this properly. The conclusion I came to is that there is a kind of race condition between honing enough to remove the striations and not honing enough to raise a burr, and that pressure plays a critical role in this. More pressure will remove the previous stone's striations more quickly, but create deeper ones of its own. Less pressure will not help much with the lower grit scratches, but will start to remove the deeper scratches from earlier on the same stone. What I ended up doing was using a small amount of pressure (torqued into the edge) at the start of each stone until the previous stone scratches were faint - this part took.linger than I expected - then reducing to minimal pressure until as few scratches as possible remained. On the 10k I did still raise a small burr, visible under the loupe, which I stropped away on linen successfully and then a few very light strokes to finish up.

An added complication is that I am not adept enough at the strokes for the heel to do them with the same light pressure. So the blending strokes at the end of each stone reintroduce more visible scratches. However these are at a different angle so it actually helps in determining when these have been removed on the next stone.

In any case, the results, while not perfect by any means, looked a lot better under the loupe, the armhair test was definitively better - and having now tried a shave with it, the results are really excellent. It's painfully obvious when an edge isn't sharp enough to take on my chin whiskers but this mowed through them with no problems at all.

There is a long way to go yet but I am very happy with where I've got to right now. Huge thanks to everyone for their patient and detailed advice especially @JPO and @H Brad Boonshaft. I feel like I am no longer just trying things at random and hoping for the best!

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

Good work, a year from now your edges will be infinitely better.

Just keep doing what you are doing, examining each step in the process and trying to perfect the finish on each stone.
And then there is stropping, that can improve and extend the quality of your edges.

Keep swinging.

 

[Frank Shaves]

Thanks! It seems like there are really two kinds of rolling X strokes. One there is actual active lift at the extremes. The other is just in your mind imagining the pressure and torque moving and it magically happening. I am trying to do the latter as a matter of course and the former where the profile warrants it. Now I have determined that continued strokes on the 1k are not causing noticeable further spine wear I am being more fussy about moving on. I will run a bunch of blending strokes to smooth the bevel angle transition.

Famous last words, but the bevel being set part seems less mysterious than I expected. From visual inspection, thumbnail test and thumbpad test it seems pretty clear when it is and isn't. I think this is probably a great starter razor I found, enough challenge to keep me learning but fairly compliant and not so out of whack as to be a total nightmare.

The goal is for each mm of the edge to make contact with the stone. We roll because the edge is not a straight line and the edge does not make contact without rolling. The amount you roll depends on the edge’s shape. Focus on the edge making contact.

When I meet a new edge, I like to divide the edge into four or five sections and use very light, short x-strokes over the different sections to learn the edge.

Ideally, you want to wear the edge and spine evenly. If you are wearing the spine faster than the edge, put a layer of tape on the spine.

If you are wearing the edge faster then the spine, put a layer of tape on the edge and hone the razor to thin the spine.

Tape is a tool, not a religion.

 

[Empire straights]

All new German razors I have honed have this typical shape to some degree. I don’t own a single razor that I can mindlessly go flat up and down the hone with.
I know I can flatten the spine and match the edge. However, there is no need to do that.
The easiest fix is to use a rolling stroke and hone to a sublte smile. You don't even need to lift either the toe or the heal. All you need is some biased torque.
There is no such thing as a perfectly straight bevel.

I have 1 Claussen(sp?) That doesn't and is the only German razor I've ever owned that didn't have this same grind warp. Maybe they were all made by the same guy(s).

 

[rhgg2]

I had another go practicing the above techniques on my Kropp 9/16. It's much easier to sense what's going on with the smaller lighter blade.

After watching Lynn Abrams running a progression on the Shapton stones I was quite surprised how few laps were needed. Of course if you are an expert then every stroke does exactly what it needs to, so I expect to be less efficient but the magnitude of the difference made me consider I must be doing something wrong.

So I tried running a whole progression using much less pressure, really as little as possible. It turns out that this alone didn't actually work, no real cutting was occuring - what I needed was much less pressure but a bit more torque. With this the bevel scratches were both much shallower to start with, and also easier to get out. This time, after running the full progression and stropping, it gave an incontrovertibly good and very close shave.

 

[JPO]

I had another go practicing the above techniques on my Kropp 9/16. It's much easier to sense what's going on with the smaller lighter blade.

After watching Lynn Abrams running a progression on the Shapton stones I was quite surprised how few laps were needed. Of course if you are an expert then every stroke does exactly what it needs to, so I expect to be less efficient but the magnitude of the difference made me consider I must be doing something wrong.

So I tried running a whole progression using much less pressure, really as little as possible. It turns out that this alone didn't actually work, no real cutting was occuring - what I needed was much less pressure but a bit more torque. With this the bevel scratches were both much shallower to start with, and also easier to get out. This time, after running the full progression and stropping, it gave an incontrovertibly good and very close shave.

These stones are really fast. If you use relatively small grit jumps, like you are, you really don't need to spend much time at each step. You will need to use progressively less strokes as you move up in grit.
When you start to pick up some resistance, and the undercut is good, you are most likely ready to move to the next stone.
These stones almost take the fun out of honing, because the process is usually over in a few minutes, provided the bevel is good.

 

[rhgg2]

Yes I've basically been sticking on each stone with lighter and lighter pressure until the scratch pattern doesn't seem to be improving. This works much better with less pressure to start or else you are just adding new deep scratches to replace the old ones. I don't count laps but I would guess about 40-40-25-10 on the 3k-6k-10k-0.85. The bevel still does not look completely polished. While I know that is not the end goal, and I don't know if I should expect it with these stones, so far there has been a correlation between more bevel polish and a nicer edge so I'll continue to try and up my game.

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

And that is “the” issue that new honers or Knife guys have difficulty understanding about honing razors. It is all about the pressure.

You need pressure, some pressure. The old “weight of the blade” is ok for final finishing but, you cannot cut a new bevel on a beater with no pressure.

Once the bevels are flat, in the correct plane and meeting, then it is just polishing, and using enough pressure to remove the previous stria, all the previous stria.

You can use pressure at the beginning laps of each stone to remove the previous stria, and once you have a new even stria pattern, then do light finishing laps to refine the edge with each stone.

One of the biggest game changers is the transition stone, where you transition from grinding to polishing, because it will remove ALL the deep bevel setting stria, making all your polishing much easier and your edge much straighter, and a more comfortable shaver.

It is all about pressure. Not just heavy or light, but the correct amount of pressure.

Here are a couple photos posted years ago by Seraphim of a piece of chalk rubbed on the sidewalk, same chalk, same sidewalk one with light pressure one with heavy pressure.

If you wanted to cut a bevel on that piece of chalk, you would start with heavy pressure, once the bevel was ground, light pressure would refine the bevel. Note the difference of the chalk at the edges.

Light pressure

Heavy pressure

 

[Frank Shaves]

Yep about the right amount of pressure.

I find that the right amount of pressure tends to produce swarf that is easier to rinse off the stone and does not get as deeply embedded in the stone.

And don’t forget about sensing resistance. In general, I don’t count strokes and, instead, pay attention to what the edge looks like and feels like against the stone, and undercuts the liquid.

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

Yea, you will learn from experience what different things feel like on a stone, like when you burn through tape, a hair on the stone, when a rough bevel smooths out, or stiction, what some call feedback.

But don’t overthink feeling, or feedback, confirm what you feel on the stone. The easiest way to identify change/progress is to look at the bevel and edge. If you see a lot of deep stria and ragged bevel, it does not matter how the stone feels.

I count strokes, but only to confirm that I am doing about the same number of strokes on each side. It takes what it takes to set a bevel or polish out some deep stria. Counting laps will keep your edge centered. You don’t need to get anal about it but roughly do the same amount on each side.

Like using hair test, don’t get caught up in trying to quantify a HHT. If it cuts hair you are going in the right direction. I could not tell you a HHT 2 from a 4, but I can tell when an edge is sharp and will shave well.

All tests are like road signs, they do not tell you when you arrived, but will tell you if you are still headed in the right direction.