Honing for beginners

[p90]

Hi, I am new to this. I have a great razor and was getting on well until it dulled and required honing.

Then I fell off the bandwagon. I read somewhere (can’t remember where but somewhere vaguely reputable) to get some chromium oxide powder and balsa wood board and use this. It didn’t do anything, at least not the way I did it. Any advice on that or any good, relatively cheap, starting points for honing would be very much appreciated.

Also, no shave was ever as good as the first one. I have been careful not to do anything daft to blunt it and have stripped like I should, but any advice on how to keep a freshly honed blade at its best for longer would be great too!

Thanks

 

[hotmetal]

Hi mate, don't take my word for gospel as I'm still learning too. I do find the balsa technique works well, but it does depend on how you approach it.

Firstly, stropping, say 50 laps in each direction before and after will help to preserve an edge, but only for so long before it needs a little refresh. You can, if you have a spare strop, also apply chromox green to one of the strops which will help to sharpen at the same time as straighten the edge, but once the chromox is on, that's that strop forever a pasted one.

I have a Miniog Welsh slate (guessing around 8k?) and a Naniwa 12k synthetic for refreshing. But I also have a set of balsa bars that I made. They are bars of acrylic for stability and straightness, each with a thick (several mm) piece of balsa glued to it. Then the balsa must be lapped flat (I used P1500 sandpaper glued to glass for doing this). Then I applied diamond spray rather than chrome oxide but it's similar. I did a set of 4: 1μm, 0.5μm, 0.25μm and 0.1μm. I think 0.5μm is roughly the same as chromox. If you're just using a bit of balsa unsupported and/or unflattened that might be where it's not working, but I'm not sure what your setup is.