After getting some really good results from the 2 stone method, I decided to change my Japanese natural stone method up a bit and go with my friend Anthony Esposito's jnat method to see what happens. Anthony uses a different jnat than I do, but he did tell me that he uses the same technique on all of his jnats and gets great results. So lets get started:
First I built a slurry up and slightly diluted it once before beginning. And during first session, I did 30/30, 15/15, 8/8 seconds on each side of both razors followed by 10 round trips to clean up the edge a bit. After that I rinsed the stone off and built a fresh slurry and did 20/20, 10/10, 5/5 seconds on each side of both razors followed by 10 round trips. I did this 2 times and I rinsed the stone and built a fresh slurry each time I did it. At the end of the 3rd session, I did 10 "X" strokes on both razors to give the edge a little more sharpness. How I did will be determined by the shave test:
After I got done, I rubbed my strop down for 25 seconds on each side before use:
I ended up doing 5 round trips on the rough leather and 10 round trips on the smooth leather to clean and polish the edge a little bit:
Under my loupe, the edges looked great. The shave test should be interesting this time around considering that I did NOT dilute the slurry between each session. In fact I started with a fresh slurry between each one. I also did NOT use clean water at the end like I had been which I personally think where I've been going wrong with this stone. So my next straight razor shave should be interesting. I'm also going to start saving up some money to buy a Suehiro 20K stone. To me that specific synthetic stone is unmatched by anyone else and it has the same micron rating that the Shapton 30K stone does but it's about $120 dollars cheaper. After getting the Shapton 12K and NOT liking the edges they produce, I'm more than confident that I made the right decision regarding Shapton's water stones. If this doesn't work, I may go back to my DE razors for a while until I have enough saved up to buy that 20K stone.
