The Honing Diaries, Part 2.

Ok, we're back to the stones. Non-straight heads, you might want to avert your eyes...


I've been working on some restorations, and with the blades all nice and pretty and back in their scales, I thought it'd be good to try out my hone skills. I've been keeping a honing diary on paper, and no here we have the digital version. How web 3.0!

So let's start with a shoulderless Torrey "Our 136".

It started out looking like this:


and after a little elbow grease ended up like this:

Not bad, if I do say so myself. But of course, it needs shaving to see if it was worth it.

I took it to a 1K diamond plate to set the bevel, and when it was shaving arm hairs I moved up to an aggressive pyramid, using a King 4K stone and a Belgian coticule instead of the 8K. After the pyramid, it was super sticky on the TPT and was popping hairs above my arm, so I polished it with 10 laps on the Shapton Pro 12K, 15 on my Nakayama with slurry and then Stropped and shaved.

The results? OK. Not great. The razor pulled a little, and did not give the smoothest shave. So we need to rework this one.

Next up was this unknown Japanese folder:

I got it cleaned up and rescaled, and now it looks ok. It's not going to win any beauty pageants, but it'll do...

This one I have honed up before but it needed a bit more work, much like the above torrey. To took it back to the bottom--reset the bevel, being SUPER careful to make sure that it shaved hairs smoothly off my arm. Then, I bumped the bevel up a notch with my newly acquired 2K Naniwa Super Stone. After that, I again tried the aggressive pyramid substituting an 8K super stone for the Coti. Polishing and finishing on 12K Shapton, Nakayama and Chromium Oxide pasted strop, stropped and shaved.

Results? A GREAT edge...really smooth, and quite sharp. Not quite first rate, but good enough for me. Satisfying as hell, it was!

And then, we have this Towa wedge from the Kawaguchi collection:



It was shaveable when I got it, but it pulled a bit--it had an edge that I think had been maintained, but not really honed, for a very long time. It pulled a bit, but cut well.

On this one, I went to the conservative pyramid, using the King 4k and Naniwa 8K, then the usual finish.

Results? Exquisite. Superb. Freaking DREAMY. As smooth and sharp an edge as you could ask for, and a damn fine morning for me.

Dance of joy time!