Thursday, October 15, 2015

My First Bevel Setting:

Well earlier tonight, I completely killed the edge of my Gold Dollar 208 to see how well the 3M Lapping Film works in terms of honing. Unfortunately it did NOT work and I had a razor that was duller than a spoon is. So the only thing you can do at this point is to reset the bevel and the ONLY honing stone that I have here is my Norton 4/8K combo stone. But I'm all for turning a negative into a positive and to my surprise, it didn't take as long as I thought it would:


So I went ahead and got started using a couple of friend's method which I will explain. The first thing I did was 100 round trips on the 4K side followed up by my usual 40 seconds, 20 seconds, 10 seconds, and then 5 seconds on each side of the razor using "half circles" followed by 20 more round trips to clean up the edge. Next I eye glassed it, did the "wet thumb nail test", followed by the shaving arm hair test and that blade removed a lot of forearm hair. This is what I'm most proud of. I have NEVER completely killed the edge of a razor before to the point where it would NOT shave and then do the technique I mentioned above and it shaved my left forearm nearly bald in some spots:


Next I did the same thing on the 8k side with an exception to the fact that I did 50 seconds on each side of the razor instead of 40 after doing 100 round trips. Other than that, I followed it up the same amount listed above followed by 20 round trips to clean up the razor. Next I stropped my razor with 5 round trips of the scrub leather followed by 15 round trips on the smooth leather:


I got a pretty good amount of slurry on the 8K side of the stone as you see below:


Here's proof that you can set a bevel on the Norton 4/8K stone and what surprised me was the fact that this entire process took about 30 minutes when I was expecting it to take much longer. The arm hair shaving test NEVER lies ladies and gentlemen:


I couldn't be more happier with the fact that I set this bevel. And the ONLY lessons I've had was watching a few friend's honing videos on YouTube and getting a few questions answered on Face Book. Thanks to all of those who helped me out with any and all questions regarding honing. I can't you guys enough and a very special thank you to the Gold Dollar Shave Club Face Book group. You guys have been the absolute best and most helpful group in terms of honing bar none. Now the amount of time I listed above can be drastically reduced by at least half if not more if I had a lower grit stone and a proper finishing stone. So as far as I'm concerned, the water stones win in terms of honing hands down.




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