Thread: 15/16 suminagashi razor in pepper jade kirinite scales

This razor was forged from suminagashi stock. That is a core layer of Japanese white paper steel, with sides of layered mild steel. Grinding this stuff is a little bit more tricky than normal tool steel. For one thing, you need to make sure that the core layer stays in the middle (which also makes forging a bit tricky) but the core steel is also harder than the other layers. The difference in hardness makes it behave a bit odd on the wheel. And any grinding errors are immediately visible.

A side effect is that this rzor also needs to be honed wiht tape, always. Because the sid ematerial is much safter than the edge material, it would also hone away much more quickly, leading to significant honewear.

The etching process blackened the core, and also highlighted the different mild layers. For this razor I stuck with a known design (my alien 2) without the large jimps. I figured that it would be better to work a known design with new steel so that I would notice the differences with previous projects more clearly.