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SOTD FRIDAY MORNING, APRIL 23, 2021
I thought I might have to spend all night on this Shumate 5/8 Tungsten steel wavy old edge! That is some hard steel! The 1k scratch pattern just didn’t want to polish away! The Norton 4/8k finally made some progress, then the Naniwa 12k smoothed out most of the roughness. It was three sets of successively diluted slurries on the jasper, however, that left me with the mirror bright, styrofoam popping bevel I like. Two rounds of pasted and one leather stropping delivered whisker melting perfection, in the prior process requiring a variety of strokes on the stones that one well-known honemeister refers to as hone gymnastics.
Nevertheless, despite all that, the result was an epic buttery smooth three pass mug shave for the history books. I sometimes wonder if there are some steels one could continue to shave with without maintenance stropping. It’s just that when one gets the kind of edges I’ve managed to coax out of the stones lately, you feel like you’re on a roll! My friend, Bill, tells me that I wouldn’t have to go through all the hone gymnastics I currently do, if I were willing to learn bumpy hones (ie convex hones). Given how well I do with flat hones, the jury’s still out. There’s really not much to say about my noggin shave. All I’ll say is I used the Nickel-plated Shake Sharp model. All my three Shake Sharps deliver flawless, dolphin smooth dome shaves, and this morning’s was no exception.
RAZOR: Shumate Tungsten Steel 5/8 (Mug), Shake Sharp Nickel Model 2
BLADES: 2 Stacked Feather DE
PREP: Cold water rinse followed by a scrub with Argan Oil
BRUSH: Viking Silvertip Badger
CROAP: A&E Kaizen
POSTSHAVE: Cold water wash with brush squeezings followed by a rinse with Humphreys Lilac WH. Finished with Krampert’s Frostbite AS Splash.
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