My latest honing improvements!

[mrmaroon]

After recieving ray's razor and testing it out I found my honing needed a LOT of help: For some reason as I felt the fragile edge of rays razor it just hit me. I could never get a great edge like that with the pressure I use. It just wouldn't be possible. So to get around this latest hurdle I placed my Norton hone on a bottle cap and learned to hone without the hone tipping off. It didn't take me long before I could get it done effectively. My end result was quite a bit better than what I am used to. However, I wasn't at Ray level yet and I wanted to see how much extra oomph I could get out of the NORTON. I added a layer of tape and did 15 very light laps on the 8k side. I then did 20 laps on my coticule and 10 passes on the CROX. End result? Well, it was a helluva lot better than last night! I would say my honing jumped from a 6.5 to an 8.5 if ray's was a 10. When I was shaving, I kept missing a strip of hair with rays razor today. I soon checked and I dulled the hell out of i where I hit my thumb! The razor is still excellent.

I want to thank all of you guys at coticule.be for helping me learn this honing business. I've come quite a long way in a short time no doubt from your help! I know I still have a long ways to go, but I'm sure I can make the road shorter compared to me alone :thumbup:

 

[Smythe]

Ahhh the Norton, it's an interesting hone, one of the first hones i bought for razors.
The fear many have is of "over honing" and create a wire edge. I suppose the grand old theory "less is more" was coined for this phenomena, but many have found ways around that issue.

One way as you so rightly done is to hone on the Norton 8K then on the Coticule to remove any wire that may exist, but what about "under honing".... try honing on the Norton for a few more strokes and don't worry about the wire, then finish with many laps on the Coticule to get that smooth edge. Interestingly enough, for a Coticule, maybe "More is better".

Good work man.