I grew a beard! i like the beard but i use miss shaving. i do touch ups of course, and man does a blade last a long time when you barely shave with it. it's been a little over a month before i blew out the blade from the touch ups. It just started to pull noticeably this morning. A perfect chance to put some diamond lapping compound on the old twinplex and take the blade for some spins. I noticed that the stropping action was a little different from side to side, when he blade flipped to the new side it would feel like the strop was applying more pressure, then it flipped back with a nice soft stropping action, then back to the other side where it was much more pressure. so having noticed that i decided to run it through a handful of spins, then to flip the blade and run it through again, hoping to even out the stropping. i'll take the blade for a run in a day or so and update you all to see if it improved the quality of the shave. oh yeah, and the blade was a personna lab.
I'm a bearded wet shaver too. I've always said I wish I could have two faces, so I could have my beard but still have a full face to shave.
well that did not work. i'll have to mess with it and try to do some more stropping. for those stropping the carbon blades? how many rotations do you do to bring a blade back to life?
Re: Carbon stropping If it's an unused blade of a brand I've not used before, I always give it a test shave without any prep on the chance it's smooth enough as is. So far only one brand of carbon has borne up to good shaves without pre-stropping. Otherwise, they get stropped...usually a few slow turns, then away we go. No set number of rotations, really. 2nd shave: Strop it, see how it feels. If it's still pulling/tugging it needs honed, then stropped a few times again. That usually clears it up. 3rd shave onward: At this point you can only go by feel to know if/when to strop/hone, or just retire it and grab another. Just this morning (around 8:00) I used a Rexall blade in my '41 Ranger Tech with some nameless bay rum shave soap. I've used Rexalls before so I stropped the blade, slowly, ten or so times each side. The no-nick, no-irritation BBS result was well worth it. It's now 7:30 pm and I'm only just starting to feel the start of stubble on my neck (where I always feel it first). Cheeks, chin and jawline are still A-OK. I was wondering if stropping a stainless would even have any effect on the edge, as the steel is harder. I guess you've answer that question.
