Nice little mail call. These three waterstones expand me options. I only had 3k and 10k waterstones so far and i was curious about how a little more range and resolution would feel.
Also, this dull-like-a-butter-knife Thiers Issard frameback. It's my first frameback, and it was a bitch to hone (I did that two days ago). It just would not pass the packing peanut test off the stone. A real mystery to me. In my limited experience, I always manage to get the edge sharp on the stone without stropping, if I used a light enough touch and alternate the sides frequently, ending on leading edge strokes. But not with this guy. It wouldn't even shave arm hair without stropping.
In my mental model, this means that the steel is ductile and forms a burr, but I'll gladly be corrected by any Honemeister who actually knows what they're doing😅
Either way, I have up after it somewhat push cut into the packing peanut, but was a bit disheartened when I compared it to the pushing-into-a-cloud sharpness of other straights. We'll see how it goes. Either I'll figure it out or maybe the steel has lost its temper and is a paper weight now?
That's why I do it. I like feedback on the sharpening process as it progresses. When I sharpen knives, I do it by feeling the edge for burr and for refinement. I can do this frequently during sharpening, and I've done thousands of knives, so I have that feel dialed in. A typical razor has half the bevel angle of a thin knife, and my feel isn't that good. For razors, the polystyrene packing peanut was the answer. It's a test that is consistent and is easy to do during the sharpening process. I can use it to determine how the edge is progressing on any stone (or slurry) in a sharpening progression. And, it also allows me to check the consistency of keenness along the entire edge.