Newcomer to straight razors curious about honing

• I was wondering how many B&B members hone their razors, or is it more common send razors out for professional honing?
• Do members recommend honing for people just getting into straights?
• Are the minimum recommended tools for honing expensive?

Gamma said:

Welcome.
I think you'll find a wide range of responses to each question.

I think a better set of questions might be....
Do you want to hone, or do you want to send your razors out?
Do you want to learn how to hone a straight and shave with a straight at the same time?
Do you have a clear definition for the word expensive?

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SliceOfLife said:

I think most people hone their own, but, we really don't have much of an active straight razor community outside of honing/restoration(kind of overlaps a bit), as far as I know. SRP would probably be a more valuable polling community for who hones their own vs pays for honing, since a lot of their longer term members/staff sell honing, and that likely leads to a much greater number of users who don't hone their own.


I would. I've never had a razor that I was happy with the edge of honed by someone else. You'd be amazed how bad the majority of people are at relatively simple tasks. Just look at the people you work with in 99.9% of industries. Based on what I've seen, you're lucky if 10% of your coworkers are even moderately competent. Sure you can only send your razors to the guys that people praise up and down... but you'll never KNOW if they're really good if you can't hone yourself. You'll always have to TRUST that they're good. Trust them, trust a third party. No difference. Our money sets a pretty high standard for whom we trust, I say stick to it. Moreover, I've seen honers praised who I've inspected the edges of and the things looked barely better than a factory GD edge. Let's not even get into how they shaved.

Not really, no. I've heard of guys starting with a set of film (can probably buy a set off someone for a few bucks), a pane of glass (Cheap/free) and a King 1k or some sandpaper (A few bucks for paper, maybe $25 for a king these days?). Now is this ideal? For some folks it is, but probably not for most. Still, this isn't brain surgery. Good enough will usually be good enough provided you're willing to keep at it until you get good results. I spent years looking for the best solution for low to mid range honing on razors. Almost a decade later I'm still using the second system I tried. I wasted a LOT of time and money trying to improve on it, finding everything to be at best a sidegrade. Maybe I got really lucky and tried the best option for me early. Maybe if I bought a set of Chosera's before my DMT's, I'd be using Chosera's now. Whatever the case, I realized long ago that all that effort spent trying to perfect low-mid range honing was really just complicating a point of honing that was almost exclusively a matter of just doing something right without worrying about what tools are the best as long as the tools WORK. Dedicating that effort to selecting an appropriate finisher paid much greater dividends.

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bluesman 7 said:

Welcome Pine.

Plenty of good advice above. I would add two things. You mentioned planning to put a small amount of Neatsfoot oil on your strop. Good move on the small amount, but I would put a lot less on, like none, until you are sure that the strop needs it. Most new strops can go years on just the oils used in tanning and you can also transfer skin oil to the strop by just rubbing it. "You can only do nothing once".

On the honing. You seem interested enough that you will enjoy it, you also give me the impression that you are patient. I would look for razor meets close to you and try to get yourself to one. You will be able to try out stones there at zero cost and see what appeals to you. You should also post you location.

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nortac said:

Welcome Pine!! I think the majority at least try to hone their own razors eventually. Most start with a razor that's been honed by someone else and take it from there. You will probably need/want two or more (standard B&B emphasis on more) razors, so if you do choose to send one out for honing, you still have one to use till you get the other back. As for cost, you can stay within your $150 budget easily if you incorporate honing films and balsa strops with either FeOx/CrOx or diamond pastes. Of course you can spend a small fortune on stones, but that is not really necessary, YMMV.

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Jnatcat said:

First off welcome to B&B and the wonderful world of straight's, my suggestion is before you rush out and buy several hundred dollars with of stones is to wait to see if straight shaving agrees with you and if it does that's great but then you have to ask yourself if you plan on having more than one razor, if you only are going to have one or two it's best if you just send them out to be honed, it will only have to be done 2-3 times a year more so if you strop incorrectly or damage the edge in other ways.

The majority of us hone are own but I have almost 20 straights, I did not start out like that it just sort of happened and even though my honing has slowed way down I can sharpen any razor I have which is why most of us do it and we find it rewarding that we can maintain our shave gear, nothing wrong with sending one or two out as lots do.

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SliceOfLife said:

I'm pretty sure his revised questions were all for you to answer. He's saying that what the majority of us did doesn't really matter. You have to decide if you want to hone or not and if you want to learn to hone after you're comfortable shaving or not. Since you're asking a bunch of guys on a razor honing page whether they think it's a good idea to hone razors, you're probably going to get stacked answers.

I'd take his thinking further and say that since you came here to ask this, you probably already have your answers to the questions he asked you.

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Pine said:

Thanks, @SliceOfLife - great information in your post. I've browsed SRP a bit, maybe I will take a more serious/longer look. Would you mind sharing your preferred method? The second system you tried. I really be interested in your process.

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SliceOfLife said:

I like DMT's. Diamond plates. I don't have all the details at hand, but they're rated to be and stay quite flat. They don't really wear on razors (the only way I'm aware of killing one is using it to lap stones) and require no maintenance. My 8k cuts the same as it did when I bought it. They're splash and go. I use a mister bottle and a rag to keep them clean during honing. They cut extremely evenly and cleanly. I've put up scope shots of the edges, and they're as straight as extremely high quality finishing stones, though the edge radius is much greater (so the edges they leave aren't as sharp as off a finishing stone, they're simply no more damaged... which as you move to a finisher becomes a much more important issue than edge radius in my opinion... generally finishers aren't poor because they don't leave a finite enough edge radius, but rather because they leave an edge too damaged; so the less damage on the edge going to the finisher, the easier time a good quality finisher will have). And a big plus for me is that I can jump to knives or other tools and back without any worries about having to level or resurface the DMT before going back to razors... which some, but not all, whetstones will sometimes require. I probably do 99% or more of my razor honing on DMT's these days. I still dilucot here and there. Sometimes I do a Nagura progression. And I play around with a number of other techniques, but a massive majority of my lower grit razor honing is done on DMT's. The character certain stones give to edges that improve the performance of knives in certain tasks seems wasted on razors, where the edge is required to be refined to such a level on a finisher, so the most efficient hone which leaves the cleanest edge for me has proven to be diamond plates. I've heard atoma's (which are preferred for lapping stones these days) don't work as well on razors, leaving a very ragged edge, though I've not tried them myself.

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