Convex 1x4" Bass Wood Blocks with Lapping Film

Description: I think we’ve jumped the shark as far as the flat/concave bevel thing goes, and people with some basic understanding of geometry don’t really debate in their head that there could be some meaningful-on-the-beard advantages to having a bevel that was concave instead of flat worth exploring. 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; they won’t need reshaping, here’s that delicious concave bevel without the hard labor! These little 4x1″ bass wood blocks have had one of their six facets 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 3M self-adhesive diamond lapping films squeegeed on to their surfaces. They’re both shaped the same way, 6.5’Ø going down the 4″ length and ~25’Ø across the 1″ width. 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 cuts, and neither are the little slices of 3M film, and then you’ve still got to put the sticker on the acrylic. Use these little blocks 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 4x1″ 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, then briefly pass upon your favored flat/hard/fine finishing stone, or alternatively a pasted strop. Strop and shave and you’ll be amazed. DO NOT erase all the coarser striations that you’ve made with the bevel-setting first three blocks via the last step!!! Doing that would mean that your flat step 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! YOU WANT TO SPEND AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE ON THE SUCCESSIVE STEPS, SO THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOUR BEVEL’S FORM REMAINS AS CONCAVE AS THE STEEL WILL ALLOW. On a 6/8″ razor, a bevel might be 0.8-1.0mm wide, and you should leave at least 0.6-0.7mm worth of that 0.8-1.0mm of width with the coarse marks from the early 30-micron and 15-micron steps, so that you’ll have a quite concave bevel which will move around more than you’re used to, and which is more thin behind the actual edge than any 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. When you tire a film, buy another, cut it down to size, peel the old one off, clean up the surface, and affix a new sheet. The shapes are the hard things to come by ‘in the wild’. I’m 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!

Price: 45 USD

Location: Jacksonville, Florida

End Time: 2024-12-04T22:02:56.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD