Thread: A very early WADE razor, plus new research.

Years ago SRP member Eaglesgift contacted me and asked if I could restore his Robert Wade razor.

I was just about to pull up stakes in Oceanside and move to the Bay Area, but I said, sure, as soon as I get moved in and have my workshop up and running.

Well, that took me over a year, and by the time I’d done it, he was having a real bad time of it. Another year passed.

Last month, after a lot of false starts, he got the razors (there was also an I. Oxley to hone) from Thailand to me for restoration and honing.

(This is not an advertisment that I’m available to do restorations.)

This is the razor as I received it.











The scales were clearly patterned exactly on the original, but more interesting still, it had this wedge:



Wedges like this with the three extra holes I’ve seen exclusively on razors from before 1805, which this categorically is not. So whoever put this poor thing back together (with steel pins, which killed my poor, crappy flush cutters) was using parts from older razors still. IE, this was almost certainly rescaled in the early 1800’s.

I ordered up some nice horn blanks from Masecraft and set about experimenting. My first thought was mockshell, but none of the transparent blanks I got had sufficient clariety and my experiments to bleach them were a total failure. So black scales it was to be.

Next post: some groundbreaking new info on Robert Wade.