Thread: Double bladed razor?

Originally Posted by Landri

I found one!!
Papillion or Butterfly Straight razor | eBay

are this things really made for shaving?
can I take them apart and try to re scale them as 2 different razors??

Maybe but .... if they were made to fit a set of scales with no monkey tail exposed you would have to reposition the pivot ..... if you have enough tang ... or shave with no monkey tail. Less than optimum IMO. Worth more $ wise as it is than it would be if you made a pair out of it. BTW, if you managed to drill the tang to place a different pivot point, you would probably have too short a distance between scales and heel for ease of stropping .... just IMHO.

Originally Posted by Landri

I found one!!
Papillion or Butterfly Straight razor | eBay

are this things really made for shaving?
can I take them apart and try to re scale them as 2 different razors??

Dude, no. These things aren't exactly easy to find. They are collectable. There are plenty of dime a dozen blades out there that you can rescale, it would be a shame to desecrate that razor.

There are quite a few of them in private collections and museums. The accepted theory is that they were made by french prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars and sold to improve their lot - there were over 100,000 french prisoners in Britain alone. Whole towns were turned into 'parole' towns and some of the french soldiers became local celebrities. I once lived on the coast near a small island which was given over entirely to the prisoners, all of whom were detained for the whole duration of the war. Sometimes barges and ships were used as floating prisons. To occupy themselves the prisoners made all sorts of goods from whatever they could get - model guillotines, boats, razors, etc, and sold them to the locals.

The razors produced by the prisoners share a similar look - very many have soldiers emblazoned on the scales, usually made form bone, had no tails as was the french fashion for razors and were a bit 'agricultural' looking. However, it seems that prisoners were not the only ones to produce these razors, which were popular in the early 1800s - a lot of them have tang and maker marks, notable for Thiers and 'acier fondu' steel designations. Others have marks for different capitals of the world, obviously mis-spelled, so probably not produced in the country they claim to be from - maybe the work of prisoners again trying to add an extra 'cachet' to their work.

What practical use were they? no tails, hard to hold, hardly any saving in weight over two separate razors, the blades are identical so one was not used for different work (eg one for coarse work, one for fine cutting), but they did have a charismatic look - perhaps that was the sole raison d'etre for them - novelty.

As if two blades were not enough to shoehorn into two scales, how about this from Thiers Museum:



The butterfly razor endured well past the Napoleonic era, too - there is a french catalogue dated 1905 featuring the work of Duvert Freres from Thiers, and it seems that they were made by them for at least a decade after this date.

Regards,
Neil

Wow... I'll watch that item just to see for how much $ it goes

There were a quite few threads and posts about these earlier on the fora.
The one that makes a lot of sense, to me, is that they were often used by seagoing sailors. The old way of ship board survival was to have what was known as "Tie Buddy." That was the guy who you trusted to tie your pigtail. He may also have been the guy you switched off shaving with. The idea of one hand for the ship and the other for yourself had a lot of meaning and still does on a small ship in a heavy sea! So the idea of someone shaving you made a lot of sense and the double razor could well be used by the shaver upon the shavee! Those guys lived out of a ditty bag, approximately 1 cubic foot of stuff which they could get at while at sea. Sea bags/sea chests were stowed below except just after entering port.
Any of you that have shaved with salt water soap and a used blade at sea, when the condensers were down, will understand better than most.
Just my take on the subject
~Richard

...and another thread that makes this place seem like a hangout for museum curators. Thanks, guys!

I believe that these were BIC's original inspiration for the Double Bladed Razor!!(:-)

There is a acier fondu double on the bay right now with a BIN of $225