Quote Originally Posted by Jfala View Post
My question is: how many razors should a newb get to start shaving with?
Jeff, for the minimalist approach, you only NEED one razor to start with... it NEEDS to be shave-ready sharp when you get it. With that you can learn to shave and along the way you'll learn to strop. After you've mastered those skills, you NEED to decide whether you want to hone your own razor when it's necessary vs sending it to someone for sharpening... if you decide to do it yourself, then you NEED to acquire tools and skills to hone. At any point in this progression, you can OPTIONALLY experiment as much (as your desire, time, and budget permits) with the hobby aspects of str8s... buying/selling razors, restoration work, scale making, collecting, etc., etc.

Now it's true that many (if not most) of us didn't follow the minimalist approach I just outlined. Many of us hit the eBay buy button almost immediately and purchased a bunch of rag/tag str8s, hones, strops, pastes, etc. A lot of us learned to sharpen and restore razors before we perfected our shaving techniques. In fact, if you read some other recent threads you'll find a lot of our longtime member shavers own tens (if not hundreds) of str8s, yet are still working on perfecting their str8 shaving technique (as evidenced by the fact that many are using DEs in conjunction with their str8 ).

Quote Originally Posted by FiReSTaRT View Post
I'd listen to Alan if I were you. He's been a seasoned shaver when I was a wet-behind-the-ears newb. Eventually you'll end up with a rotation of 10 or so...
Sage advice to listen to Alan. But it's completely unnecessary to set a goal of having 10 razors in your rotation. I'd venture to say that the most of our members have only a couple razors in their regular rotation. Of course, there are also some who have hundreds... but I think that's the exception.

Personally, I own several dozen razors (most of which are in various stages of restoration). I have 4 that I consider in my "rotation"... but of those, I use two of them MOST of the time. The other two have fallen out of favor as I've acquired razors that I like to shave with better.