After this morning's shave, I decided to go "old school" on my honing session with my Gold Monkey razor. I've honed and touched up this razor an unknown number of times and I can definitely say for certain that it takes more time to hone the Gold Monkey razors:
Step one was to check and see what was going on and under the loupe, it looked good but it also looked like it was slightly out of alignment and I had already stropped it earlier:
So I went ahead and reset the bevel with my usual 60/60, 30/30, 15/15, 8/8, and 15 round trips to clean up the edge a bit and then I did 10 more round trips after doing my usual thumbnail test. The Naniwa Professional 600 grit is an excellent bevel setting stone. 2 minutes is all it takes to set a bevel on a brand new razor that's never been honed before or a vintage that needs a lot of work:
Next I did 10 round trips on the nylon webbing of my strop between each stone:
Now it was time for the Norton 4K side of my combo stone in which I did the usual routine of 60/60, 30/30, 15/15, 8/8, and 15 round trips to clean it up a bit:
Next I did 10 more trips on the nylon webbing of strop again:
Next I did the same thing on the 8K side of my Norton stone that I did with the 4K side:
Then I followed that up with a full stropping routine of 20 round trips on the nylon webbing, 40 round trips on the scrub leather and last but not least 80 round trips on the smooth leather:
I loved using Dr. Matt's honing routine which I will use on natural finishing stones, but for me I prefer my old method in terms of progression. It simply works best for me and it's also faster in terms of going from bevel set to finish. 2 to 5 minutes to set or reset a bevel is really fast and combined with Dr. Matt's Coticule/ILR finishing technique, you can bang a razor that's more than shave ready in no time and you really don't need the full progression either. Another couple of friends of mine use only 2 stones to hone a razor.
