Thread: OCD Razor swapped for historical wood

A friend of mine, Jaydee, spent some time while in the Naval Reserves aboard the USS Constitution. The ship is constantly being refitted, with only about 15% of the wood being from the original build. He sent me a small package with some stabilized wood. When I called to thank him he explained that most of the wood was Douglas fir that was not from the original build. There were 2 pieces that were original oak from the 1795 build. Original wood from the oldest commissioned warship in the world....pretty damn cool!!! He also included a few pieces of Kauri, ancient wood from New Zealand. This stuff is at least 60,000 years old, also cool.

When I asked what I could possibly do to pay for all this, he said "money can't buy this...I want one of your razors". So here it is.
I regret that the only 2 pictures I have of it are a couple I took with my cell phone to send to him via text message. It is a 8/8's square point with jimps on top and bottom and on the front of the nose instead of a barbers notch. The grind is full hollow and the finish is near-mirror. All the lines are straight and angular, modern looking, so I put silver twill (like silver carbon fiber) scales with a polished aluminum spacer.

As always, thanks for looking
Bob at OCD Razors

That is a sweet deal all the way around Bob. Can't wait to see what you do with that wood.

Wow awesome deal.

Great razor, Bob! I dig it! He should really enjoy that!

Now....You knew this was coming! U..S..S.. C..O..N..S..T..I..T..U..T..I..O..N

Beautiful razor. Kauri is really nice to work with, fine grain, and used a lot for carving down here. Most of it is quite plain in colour and pattern, but some pieces have a sheen, hard to describe, but almost 3 dimensional, if that makes sense? The timber you have will be swamp Kauri, best guess is that a giant tsunami hit the top of the north island here and knocked them all over, and these trees are massive so must have been one hell of a tsunami. They are still digging it up, but sadly, most of it is being exported to China. It was used a lot in boat building, because of it's resilience to water.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Bob today. He has garnered enough wood from Old Ironsides to scale several razors, it seems.
Some nice razors, historically scaled. Gonna be neat to see!

Another beautiful razor, Bob. I can't wait to see one with historical wooden scales.

Ancient Kauri harvesting.

The Ancient Kauri Kingdom Extraction Process on Vimeo

BIG trees! Would have been interesting to see the forest in its prime.

Indeed! To think of the event of a tsunami such as that. My!

What a coincidence. Constitution day is TODAY! September 17.