For a minute there when it was all shotguns i thought we'd lost the topic for good
Exactly.
@Jacob lives for this!
Waterstones produce a very fine edge because they are smoother ( less coarse ) and some of them are ridiculously fine. And now expensive.
Ive got waterstones, oil, lapping film ( very good ) diamond pastes, different strops, whetstone grinder.
I can get a usable edge with any of the above, but you cant get an edge good enough to shave your face with a coarse stone of any description.
My biggest sharpening triumph was reviving an ern ator ( circa 1918 ) with a shave ready edge. My first properly sharp edge from blunt. Imagine using a chisel that sharp
Imagine being able to use a chisel that *thin*. At 16-18 degrees....I didn't believe that it would be any different to hone a razor when starting, but it's definitely the case that preventing defects is a little harder in such a thin edge. But when the edge does give way just a little over time, the thin cross section still makes it so that it will catch a hair easily.
I could get caught going on at length about razors and how wonderful the straight razor is vs. anything now because of the ability to set an edge that will stay the same 200-300 shaves in a row, and about its ability to prevent razor burn because it can be set so that it will catch a hair, but not the skin behind the pore that the hair props up. Effectively severing the hair and then sliding over the skin.
But you can certainly make a razor sharp enough that it will cut both, and there's no real virtue to it.
I have to be careful, though, or I'll bore everyone even more and some guy will add that definition to "overhoning".
I have a picture of a razor that was used for almost a year.
Compared to the one freshly honed:
There's just not much difference between being to the linen two times and 40 except the scratches suggest that at some point, dirt or something got on the linen.
the scale of these pictures is 2 hundredths of an inch top to bottom.
What I gather from this is that you could hone a lifetime with a razor and use a couple of hundredths of an inch off of the edge and never have a bad shave.
compared to this - a disposable double edge razor blade will generally start denting on the first shave. They're softer. I get a chuckle out of the article format that comes out once every half decade or so: "scientists have determined what causes razors to dull, and it's not that they wear out".
You don't say.
I'd bet engineers and marketers at the razor companies figured this out a long time ago - that there's no great reward to making a razor blade a little harder - someone will break a few putting them in a razor, and the only ones who would ever think their razor got dull are the ones that allow dried soap to build up behind the edge.
This is an astra razor blade after something like two or three shaves:
Still shaves OK here but is on the way down hill fast, and within a week for me it's time to change the blade. I have actually honed these (double edge) blades - but the core of the steel is too soft to hold up without its coating. and the coating hides the dullness of the edge a little bit by allowing the blade to slide across skin.
...there, I just went on about razors a little bit...,nobody is going to remember anything I type here or in the overhone post, so I guess I'm just bored.
if nothing else it'll take a day or two to read it all 
