Thread: can anyone share their experiences with DE's?

Very little maintenance (change the blade once or twice a week, clean the soap scum off every now and again).

They can shave very close indeed. It takes some experimenting to find out the best combination of razor and blade, though a true DE master can easily get BBS with any combination most people have a favorite -- mine is the gillette fatboy and either the american personna blade or the merkur (dovo) blade. Feather also makes a highly acclaimed blade. American personna blades are about $.10 apiece, Feathers are about $.50 apiece, the other brands tend to be somewhere in between. Avoid the Gillettes that you find in the drugstores, they are the most expensive and worst quality (russian made) of all the choices.

Shaving with one is a little wierd, mostly because the angle you use is different from a cartridge razor and the blades are very thin and flexible, but if you use them like a cartridge razor they will kind of shave but cause nicks and razor burns. The DE is really an evolutionary dead end, in that nothing that came afterwards looks or works like them, and this tends to trip people up because their experience is all wrong.

The Schick Injector is another replaceable-blade razor that uses a single-sided blade and is kind of the granddaddy of the modern cartridge razor. The blades are readily available from CVS or Walgreens, and they shave almost identical to a cartridge razor except without the razor burn and $$$ cartridges. The blades are more expensive than the DE blades, but they are stouter blades and last longer, and come in this nifty magazine-fed loading widget that ejects the old blade from the razor and loads a new one into place, so you don't have to touch the blade except to put the old one into the blade safe in the back side of the loader.

I own both, but of the two I prefer the DE because the greater variety of blades means that I found a DE blade that better matches my beard than the standard injector blade. But I could have mastered the injector in seconds, whereas it took me a month or so to master the DE.