My weekends work.

I started restoring this nice old Bengall on the weekend. All was going well until a disaster (which I do not want to talk about...) caused about 1/3 of the blades edge to break off. Apart from being upset that I had destroyed what promised to be a very nice blade, I had also put in many hours hand sanding and making new scales for it.

Resisting the temptation to throw the whole lot in the trash, I decided that since the blade was ruined anyway, I might as well experiment with it.

I thought about how you often see small travel sized safety razors but you never see travel sized straights. Why not, I thought. So off to my new belt grinder I went. I decided that this was also going to be a time trial, pretending that this was a paying job and the deadline was near. I was getting paid by the unit and not the hour! Since the blade was already 90% polished, I would say the job, from grinding down the blade and tail, to designing and making new scales, to fitting and finishing, the whole thing was about three hours solid work. Not bad, considering this is only my second restore.

Anyway, the scales are a dark tinted clear acrylic, with a red acrylic wedge. The blades cutting edge is now 50mm and the whole thing, with the tail, is 135mm. I'm actually quite happy with the shape and the balance of it. It feels really nice in the hand. I just wish the airlines would let me travel with a straight razor so I could use it on trips.