Description
In switching my own honing over to wheel shaped forms [to achieve a concave bevel profile either in part or in whole] the last ~4 years, I’ve realized renewed success with the ole’ coticule. My beard, quite surprisingly to me because well in to my early thirties I enjoyed broad swaths of baby-bottom-soft beard zone skin, has become a bonafide problem. Whisker density’s low, sure, but the rat bastards are coarse and stiff, and you can tell it isn’t good just from listening to the videos of me shaving in my office here…it doesn’t sound much better at home after a shower! My wife has one of these things (please use that link to finalize a purchase, it doesn’t have to be the steam thingy, it can be this or this or even this, just click it and make a buy within the ‘cookie’ time they decree and I’ll earn 1% or more, I’m struggling out here yo! also, my house burned down >5mos. ago and as I write this I am STILL fighting with the rat bastard State Farm adjuster Stephen…every contractor in town knows Stephen, Stephen’s who they assign around here on any big claim to give you the runaround), and I have used it to pre-shave, and it definitely helped. That’s a whole lot of work, and it is boring, too. Using the razor’s fun. Anyway, here writing at fifty point five spins around the sun, to get a comfortable and close shave around the goatee zone of my face is an extreme challenge for any shaving system, and for at least five years prior to switching to the wheel-shaped form, I’d entirely given up upon coticules.
But that was because the bevels I used were the standard flat bevels we all “knew” were the correct shape for a straight razor. Once I started thinning the rear of the bevel to make the tip a bit more flexible, and then by extension finishing all the way through with convex surfaces so that my bevel’s tip was two curved arcs coming together instead of two lines intersecting, I was able to use the coticule quite comfortably and close, on occasion, in the tough parts. It is still a big ask, but it can be done. That’s a huge accomplishment for my face at this point.
I think setting up your bevel to be concave with a stone pairing such as this one, and finishing upon either a flat/hard/fine manmade stone, or a flat coticule bout, or a paste-charged strop, you’ll be spellbound.
For this SKU, I’ve used this shaping tool to create a 6.5’Ø diameter down the 6″ length of the side of this two-sided stone that’s Pyrénées slate, and then created a 25’Ø diameter down the length of the BBW side. In so carving these curved forms from within the supplied rectangles, ~2.4mm of the slate side’s corners was consumed, and ~1.2mm from the BBW side.
Set in most of a razor or other fine cutting tool’s bevel span with the Pyrénées side, then refine its remainder with the BBW side, and finish on your finisher of choice. Fast and easy work! Although you will be surprised at how well this stone keeps its special shape for many uses, if you’re a perfectionist, buy a slurry stone or a prep stone and use sandpaper to shape that to the inverse of one side of your bench stone; then, depending upon which side of the stone you’re rubbing it upon, you orient the rubbing stone so that it matches the shape of that which is underneath, and this will remove the high spots and avoid the low spots quite well.
