August 3, 2024
2 passes. Face lather. Excellent shave. $headless $FriodomRiders
Edge Condition Album
Another day, another vacation from stropping. Today's shave was more comfortable and closer than the last two days. How can that be? I've done no stropping, and some straight razors shavers strop before the shave, during the shave, and after the shave. Well, all part of the grand plan.
TLDR; My technique is adapting. (Feel absolutely free to ignore the following.)
I thought of this "no stropping" challenge when u/djundjila first suggested the idea of FriodomRiders. I strop after shaving mostly because I want to make sure that the edges on my (mostly carbon steel) razors get completely dry. With stainless steel, that's really not an issue. Towel drying will suffice.
In my very early days of shaving (just after the asteroid wiped out the dinasaurs), a DE blade was supposed to go one month of (1-pass) shaves. No stropping. Since taking up the hobby and also understanding the value of multi-pass shaving, I tend to toss a DE blade between 8 and 12 uses. No stropping. Artist Club blade? Twenty-ish uses. No stropping. GEM twenty-ish uses (but 31 was no problem). No stropping. u/sgrdddy has put a few (😉) shaves on a single Nacet blade over the years. No stropping.
You get the point.
If machine-made blades provide great shaves and don't need daily stropping why in the world do straight razors? I think the answer is just tradition and perhaps, honing technique that relies on stropping for final edge condition. I think I'm relying on the former because I know I don't do the latter.
Since I knew I would try to go 31 days with one edge, I chose to create an edge that is slightly less refined, and I worked to create convex roundness at the apex. I expect that this type of edge is more durable at the expense of a little closeness. The shaves I had on days 1 and 2 were very comfortable and slightly less BBS than my normal 2-pass routine. Pretty much what I expected. For today's shave I played with angle and pressure a bit and was quite surprised to have shave quality that equals my normal straight razor shave. Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks!
In past years I have kept a microscope photo record of edge degradation. I'm doing that this year as well, but I think it isn't really necessary to update edge condition daily. This time around, I plan to make one photo each week. I made a photo of the edge condition before use, included it at the end of my honing video, but did not post it here.
Here is a photo of the razor's edge on July 31.