What Straight Razor Have You Honed Lately????

Thank you Steve.

 

Some football honing...
A couple of “J.A.” 14’s: J.A. Schmidt & Sohne and J.A. Henckels

Sticking with the recent favorite progression of Suehiro 1&6k followed with that Nakayama tomo on an Okudo.

Happy honing.
Tom

 

Not a complete hone, but I spruced up a 100 year old Salamander "Our Wedge" using a progression of chromium oxide pasted suede, 200k diamond pasted balsa, and the usual linen and horse hide Illinois strop.

 

Just making stuff Sharp n Smooth as the snow falls









Here is a teaching moment I only wish I could have got the pics to come out

Do you know how to tell if it is your honing or the steel that is giving you problems just from reading the edge, can you tell if the Temper is too hard or too soft ??
Do you know how to test the correction for it ???

 

Wow, you were productive.

No idea how to tell if the temper is good or not. When I have a razor I can't hone I send it to you.

 

hehehe "Send it to Glen he'll hone anything"

This is actually pretty cool I imagine a few people here might know it already will post here in a bit give people time to think about it

 

Couple of oldies up today and last night, with a similar age and history.

On the right, a new to me Lakeside Cutlery 6/8. That’s a Montgomery Ward brand, and they sold a lot of razors imported through Boker. On the left, a mellow old Manhattan Cutlery Co 1/4 hollow Sheffield, a big old softie in horn scales that needed a lot of neatsfoot oil over the past few weeks. It’s in restorable condition. I used 1 layer of electrical tape just to keep the bevels cosmetically pleasing.

From a post by mannah on SRP, the Manhattan Sheffield brand was owned by John Watts, Sheffield, and John Newton & Co, Manhattan Works, Sheffield. These razors were sold through H. Boker in America until 1916. The Lakeside has very soft steel in it and is quite hollow and light. I’ll be interested in @gssixgun post on tempering. There’s no country name, so it’s pre-1891 or an American made razor. Kind of reminds me of a Torrey except for the soft steel. The scales are plastic though, so barring a rescale it’s probably 1910-ish or later. A curious razor for sure. Maybe a domestically sourced razor after WWI complicated the supply chain?

Both were treated to Shapton Glass stones, the Manhattan starting at 2k (my normal bevel setter in the Glass Stone line), and the Lakesdide’s bevel set on the 4k Glass. I could have set the bevel on the Manhattan with the 4k, but the toe needed a little extra work, so the ‘normal’ 2k came out. Prefinisher for both was a butterscotch Nakayama kiita with diamond plate slurry. Then the Lakeside was finished using a new karasu, and the Manhattan using a nice, mellow, Sheffield-friendly Nakayama. And we can test shave tomorrow.

 

Reading the Temper


https://theshaveden.com/forums/threads/honing-reading-the-temper.63580/

 

Why the MMT ??? Magic Marker Test

Because you can easily see when a razor has 3 different bevels and where the issues are

It doesn't matter how many razors you have honed before it is still a useful tool to use






Hone On

 

Just a note about multiple bevels, many times old razor spines will be tapered because they were honed for decades at an angle to the stone. Look at this W&B spine and you don’t need calipers to see that the spine is thicker over the heel than the rest of the blade. What caused this is most likely being honed at an angle to the stone as in the second image. If you hone like the second image, you’ll cut a bevel like it’s ‘used to’. If you hone it like in the third image, you cut a different bevel because the thick spine over the heel is now on the stone raising the heel much like running the stabilizer up on the hone would do.

Either one is technically OK I suppose, but with these mellow old razors I usually hone them like they’ve been honed all their lives, it’s just easier and there isn’t any downside. BUT if you mix and match angles, some like image 2 and some like image 3, you will cut two different bevels on the same edge and the edge never seems to develop properly. You can make a bevel as in the second image, then do a few strokes as in the third, and you’ll see two bevels at least until you fully re-cut it.

If the spine is the same thickness, you don’t have this issue but a lot of old razors are worn this way. You could brute force the spine even but that would be a terrible thing to do to a nice old razor that survived this long in good shape.

 

BTW, that smoothly curving taper on the spine is called a distal taper in the knife world, and it's a sign of a high end handmade knife, a very desirable thing to see.

 

Yep, ignore the uneven wear, and learn to hone around it, once you see what you have. After you learn to hone many many worn razors, the uneven spine is not an issue, just a small adjustment.

.

 

Got home from work, lapped this koppa and touched up the Cape 650 with diamond slurry diluted to watery misty one. Razor was sticking pretty well. Bevel and spine were nicely polished so I decided to shave. 5 days growth wiped effortlessly. Nice finisher.

 

Wade and Butcher wedge

 

Just having some fun on a chilly blustery afternoon. Test Monkeys standing by! Not that cold really but not comfortable for the valley. I’m revisiting some old favorites from the stone hoard, the stone at the bottom I’d have to call ‘big ugly’, it has every defect in the jnat catalog, glassy lines, brown lines, layer cracks, regular cracks, unstable corner, yet none of them are toxic. And the color is - well I don’t know the Japanese words for ‘dirty pond water’ lol. But in stone comparisons like this one, it usually wins. Gold Monkey M-3 gets ‘big ugly’.

The other stone is likely a Shobudani according to the skin on the back and Alex Gilmore actually checked it out too. It’s a nice light water blue asagi on a fitted stand, very pure except for one tiny spiderweb crack that doesn't need attention. I’m always fond of stones on fitted bases. Gold Monkey M-2 gets the Shobu.

Shave test tomorrow!

 

Some different stones playing around

Wosty Pipe Finished on a Charnley Forest Stone



Thomas Turner Finished on a Haida Gawii Hone Thanks to @RezDog



Hone On !!!

 

A friend of mine sent me a Hoshi Tombo 6000 to play with, thanks sir! It had been honed with a layer of the thinner electrical tape, so that’s what I used, Scotch 700. I began with a Shapton Glass 4k and the bevel set almost instantly. I had not done a Mikawa nagura progression in some time, so I pulled out a hard, dense pale green something on a fitted stand and gave it a traditional edge. This is a hard stone, and it’s also the densest jnat that I have. The stand looks like it’s a hundred years old, and may be, weathered by water and slurry, yet the stone appears almost unworn from it’s thickness. A friend of mine was trying it out years ago and christened it ‘The Boulder’ because of it’s size and weight.

The first nagura on the left is actually an Odori which I use in place of botan/tenjou, Alex Gilmore says that this is the same stone formation as Mikawa, but it comes from a neighboring province, so like the name ‘champagne’, the same wine from a few hundred yards in the next district can’t be named the same. At any rate, it’s very fast and I’m not sure that it isn’t finer than the next stone, a mejiro. Next up is koma that Alex sourced from a gentleman in Japan selling the last of his nagura stock, and this piece grades as koma, fairly hard and quite fine. Following that was a tomo nagura, and we’ll see what ‘the boulder’ can do. It has always made very smooth edges.

 

Looks like a brick, its so big.

 

I love it when the wooden base looks super old.

 

It’s standard bench size pretty much, but it’s almost 40mm thick. Everyone on TSD could hone on this thing for the rest of their lives and there’d still be a lot of stone left.

I’m on the fence. I appreciate the aged look because it is aged. But I also kind of like the stands to look like the handles of well-worn but tended wood working tool handles, say a set of fine vintage E. A. Berg chisels. But that isn’t how the stands were used, they were not tended to at all. That could be by design, maybe they were intended to draw or wick moisture away from the stone? They degraded over time. The ‘boulder’ is on a fitted base, and stands custom fit to a specific stone will likely never be made again, so I’d like to be a good custodian while I have them.

You had to think a lot of a stone to put the labor into this.