During this morning's shave, I could tell that it was definitely time to re hone the Gold Dollar 66. And even though I got a really close shave and had a squeaky clean type post shave, I had some serious razor burn after 3 passes. So let's get started:
First I started with my Soft Arkansas oil stone and I did 30/30, 20/20, 10/10, 5/5 seconds worth of half circles (back and forth motion) on each side, followed by 25 round trips at which point the razor started to glide across the soft Arkansas effortlessly. When a razor begins to glide across an oil stone with no resistance and no effort, you are done with that specific oil stone and aren't going to get any more out of it either:
After I stropped the razor on the nylon webbing of my strop for 10 round trips, I went to the 4K side (or what's left of it) of my Norton 4/8K combo stone and it took roughly around 60 round trips until it felt sticky and struggled to go across the stone. Once I got to that point, I stropped the razor on the stone for exactly 5 round trips. And then I turned up the water to increase the hydroplane effect to get a keener edge. The second time around it only took 40 round trips until it felt sticky and I then went back to the nylon webbing of my strop for another 10 round trips :
Next up I repeated the same process listed above on the 8K side only this time it took about 75 round trips until it felt sticky and wouldn't go across the stone and I followed that up with 5 stropping strokes on the stone and then I went back to honing strokes. The second time around, I turned the water up and ended up doing 40 more round trips until it felt sticky:
Next I followed that up with a full stropping routine which consists of 10 round trips on the nylon webbing. 20 round trips on the scrub leather and then 60 round trips on the smooth leather:
I'm more than confident that this razor is ready because I didn't kill the edge before beginning this honing session. I thought this was going to be a roughly around a 5 minute session on the stones even after checking out the edge under my loupe. That was not the case at all. I ended up spending 20 minutes on the stones instead. If this edge isn't comfortable tomorrow, I will kill the edge and start over with just the 8K side of the Norton and see what happens. The Arkansas oil stones and Shapton water stones are looking pretty good now.
