Description
However, many men reading this who might already agree on the concepts in theory have not really tried the concave bevel shaving thing much themselves, both for not wanting to buy an expensive custom lapping plate or find a similar shape “in the wild”, nor to have to suffer through reshaping their whetstones. Manual labor stinks!
Well, that’s where these little guys come in; it won’t need reshaping, and gives you that concave bevel for peanuts!
These little 4x1x1″ Bass wood blocks have had one of their four 1×4″ surfaces shaped with “the Jarrod plate” and polished through 1000# sandpaper fineness, doused with isopropyl alcohol so I could be sure to get a bubble-free adhesion, and then had a small slices of 15-micron (~1200#) and 30-micron (~600#) 3M self-adhesive diamond lapping films squeegeed on to their surfaces.
They’re not parts for the Space Shuttle; I’m trying with my Dahle trimmer to cut them down perfectly, but the little wood blocks aren’t exactly perfect in their 1x1x4″ cuts, and neither are the little slices of 3M film, and then you’ve still got to put the sticker on the wood. That’s OK, though, because straight razors aren’t perfect, and don’t forget that the wood block is an ellipse, not a cylinder; the center line of the wood block is ‘taller’ than the “railings”.
Use this little block with a sparing but thorough application of honing oil of some sort, like plain mineral oil or Ballistol, so that you can get quite a few uses out of the block. With the ~600# 30-microns’ action and the shape of 6.5’Ø x 25’Ø expressed across the 4″ x 1″ shaped section, you will overtake the bevels of razors that have been honed on flat surfaces extremely fast! After that work’s done, duplicate the same actions with the 15-micron block, and you’re then ready for whatever further refinement you like…a pasted strop progression, a flat hard fine finisher, etc.
Presuming you have a collection of finer and kept flat sharpening stones, you will then further refine your new quite-concaved bevel on your other, flat, finer stones…but DO NOT erase all the coarser striations that you’ve made with this bevel-setting stone!!! Doing that would mean that your flat/hard/fine stone just reshaped the whole bevel, and we don’t want that; we want a mostly-concave bevel with as fine an apex as can be managed, WITHOUT ever chasing the “as fine an apex” thing at the cost of the “mostly concave” thing!
This stone will leave behind a concave bevel shape with either a frayed semi-apex, or a clean apex with a little “burr” hanging off of the end of it, usually pointing slightly toward the opposite side of the bevel from which you just worked over. When you switch to your flat stones with finer action, they’ll immediately begin first by removing the burr or frayed-ended bevel you’ve just created, and then by bludgeoning, geometrically speaking, the concaved shape you’ve just created by carving in a thicker, finer-apexed, flat tip on what remains of the incumbent concave bevel. In Germany, nowadays they generally set in cutting edges on razors with a slightly convex spinning disc, and then refine them on stones that are either flat or hand shaped slightly convex, and when they come off of the wheel and on to the stones they keep a little slab of wet horn nearby and ‘breadknife’ the razor’s edge through the horn, which I presume wipes off the little burr and leaves behind the slightly concaved bevel shape they’re chasing. However, they don’t have 6.5’Ø-shaped extra fine wheels in Germany; if they did, they’d use them instead of those barely-convex spinning platter thingies!
YOU WANT TO SPEND AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE ON THE SUCCESSIVE STEPS, SO THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOUR BEVEL’S FORM REMAINS CONCAVE, NOT FLAT. Once you’ve taken over the whole bevel span with this tool, switch to at most two flat/fine/hard type stones, and honestly it will work better to use natural, slow, hard stones than to use modern waterstones.
You could use something like a ~3000-5000# flat waterstone very briefly, write with a permanent marker only at the very apex of your incumbent concaved bevel, and stay on your flat waterstone until such time that the first 0.1-0.2mm worth of width of the bevel as expressed from the apex toward the spine has had the permanent marker removed, and at that point if you were to switch to a flat/hard/fine finishing stone, you are guaranteed to have it only refine the little flat triangle apex you’ve just created with your second-step stone. A bevel might be 1.0mm wide on a healthy 6/8″ razor, and you should leave at least 0.7mm worth of that 1.0mm of width with the coarse marks from this “stone”, so that you’ll have a mostly-concave bevel, which will move around more than you’re used to, and which is more thin behind the actual edge than your flat bevel can provide.
The thinness and movement are what makes the concave bevel so great in my opinion, the actual use of a concave shape all the way through to the apex is not something I think the vast majority of straight razor shavers will actually need (though, to be fair, I can say unequivocally speaking for myself that the very best shaves I get are when none of the bevel form has been made flat…FINISHING that way in honing, however, is a true perpetual challenge).
These blocks are not a permanent solution, but then no sharpening stones last forever. You’ll get quite a few razor-resets out of it, I’d imagine. I’m going to switch this idea to acrylic blocks, which are a little more expensive but I don’t think any harder to reshape given the abrasives I have at my disposal, so you’ll see those “acrylic blocks kits” for sale here in a few weeks. But I am also working to have in late 2024 or early 2025 an offer of a permanently-shaped diamond hone, using the same basic shape shown here but with 1000# diamond mesh in a shape that won’t change and a surface that’s 2×6″, for a small speedy bench stone.
For a homebrewed noncommercial sharpening solution, however, with the razor stationary in your off hand or in a table vise and these little rubbing blocks moving on the stationary razor, you can do a lot worse!
