After this morning's shave, I decided to re hone my Gold Dollar 208 using Dr. Matt's ILR technique. It's a good thing I did because this one took a little while. Basically I honed it on the Norton 8K under running water until it feels sticky and doesn't quite want to go across the stone. The first round took 120 round trips and 40 seconds worth of half circles on each side before it started to struggle to go across the stone. Then I went to the nylon webbing side of my strop and did only 10 round trips. After that I went back to the stone and under a slightly stronger stream of water, I ended up doing 100 round trips followed by 50 more round trips after I turned the flow of water up yet again:
Next I followed that up with 10 round trips on the nylon webbing, 20 round trips on the scrub leather and finally 40 round trips on the smooth leather side of my strop. Under my Loupe, the edge looked like a freshly polished mirror with hardly any scratches at all. I also noticed a white sliver after I got finished honing. Which means that I can't use the 4K side of my Norton anymore. So I'll be looking at becoming a dealer and seeing what stones I can get later on. It's hard to believe that around July 6th, will make 1 year of honing my own razors.
