Thread: A little something for myself...

Decided to make myself a razor out of some new steel I was trying out.

This one is made from Hitachi White Paper steel. It is a thin piece of white paper steel with super soft steel folded over it and the white steel only extending halfway into the blade.

I actually didn't know the soft steel was folded as such, but once seeing it I decided to etch the blade and bring out the layers. The tang/spine area are all finished to a mirror finish and I left the blade at a satin finish for the etch.

The file work is something new I tried and is kind of a vine pattern. Definitely was very difficult and hard to finish sand. I like the way it came out.

After hardening, suggested tempering was 400° for a HRC of 63. I double tempered at 385° hoping to get 63-64 HRC for my hardest razor yet. I took it to the chosera 400 and then moved onto the 1K. At this point I started to get worried, as I couldn't establish a bevel as the edge kept microchipping. I was very worried at this point and thought about tempering it again at a higher temperature, but before that I pulled out some 12 um lapping film to give it a go. Needless to say, in 5 minutes I had a bevel shaving arm hair nicely with no microchips to boot. I decided to finish up honing on lapping film progressing to 0.3 um finish.

First shave WTG and it clearly was the most keen razor I ever put to my face. Ultra light pressure ala a Kamisori was needed. Definitely different than any other carbon steel I've used. The shave itself was fine, but the edge was a little too much for me, so the next day I took it to my Wakasa JNat that I normally use on kamisori's and tweaked the edge a bit. Resulting shave was as smooth as can be.

Measures about 13/16 to 7/8 wide and the scales are made from silver twill G10 with a blue/black recon stone wedge.

Looking forward to this one in the rotation. Thanks for looking!