Recycling DE Blades -> Straight?

Hey guys...I see a lot of smithing knowledge here and I have next to none, so please pardon me if this post is hopelessly, ineptly noobish.

The short of it is, I've been keeping all my old DE blades (I use a SR for my face and a DE on my head unless I have hours of careful shaving to kill) and plan to recycle them one day when the container (a small margarine tub) is full. However, the other day I had a thought...

What if I could recycle them...myself? There's several how-to's here on this forum for building your own forge and I'm sure I could find an anvil somewhere (space for the forge is, of course, a pipe dream as I live in a high-rise apartment :D). Well, maybe not, but this post is about feasibility of the project in general, not to my current circumstances.

What I was thinking is that I could take all those old DE blades and fire them up and hammer them layer-by-layer into a single piece and then make a straight razor out of them. What do you guys think? Is that even possible? What sort of steel quality goes into those things? To make answering this easier, let's assume hand hammering and a homemade gas forge like the can-of-beans one I saw here...

Most DE blades are stainless & thin, so I would be afraid that you would burn the blades before youcould get them all to welding temperature. I have no clue how to forge weld stainless...never heard of it, but again, it's steel so it may be possible. Try it, would be a fun adventure!

Mike Blue - let's hear from you on this.

Mike will probably say the same thing I am going to say: don't bother.

Those things are so thin, that if you bring them to forge welding temperatures, they'll be burnt to crispy scale before you even have the chance to hit that stack with a hammer. Of course, if you have an oven where you can control the atmosphere and if you weld that stack together tightly before heating it, and flux everything thoroughly during the heat... you 'may' have a chance of pulling it off. But then the question would be 'why bother' because you will still end up with inferior steel at a higher price than a normal piece of tool steel stock. Especially considering that you'd have to make a really big stack and then draw that postage stamp area sized out to razor size.

I heard you can pour vinegar on them and feed them to your plants...maybe try that instead

There was a guy in my basic training outfit that would eat a razor blade for $5. He'd crunch it with his teeth, and swallow the little pieces. Never did a close exam of his teeth.

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Originally Posted by skipnord

There was a guy in my basic training outfit that would eat a razor blade for $5. He'd crunch it with his teeth, and swallow the little pieces. Never did a close exam of his teeth.

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That's messed up dude.

Thanks for the help, gentlemen. :chapeau
I think (unless the feeding-to-plants suggestion wasn't facetious?) my best choice for my wallet and the environment would be to send these off to be properly recycled.
Thanks again!

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Originally Posted by DarthLord

Thanks for the help, gentlemen. :chapeau
I think (unless the feeding-to-plants suggestion wasn't facetious?) my best choice for my wallet and the environment would be to send these off to be properly recycled.
Thanks again!

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I was being serious. Apparently, the vinegar will supposedly break down the blades and the resulting liquid is good for plants. I've heard multiple people say this but haven't tried it personally, so I don't know how true this is.

I don't know the details of stainless and know even less about welding but, I do know that when they weld stainless at work they wear a helmet with an air supply - Toxic fumes? may not even be related, but worth noting I think.

You can weld stainless, you can forge weld stainless, and you can forge stainless...

Forging those blades into a bar is plausible, maybe not practical. Stainless needs to be forge welded in essentially a vacuum, or at least an oxygen free environment. If you were to get a piece of square steel tubing, weld a cap on the end, then stack the blades tightly, or crush them into little pieces, fill the can you created, weld on a lid, airtight. Bring it up to welding heat, let soak at temperature, then use a hydraulic press to compress the can and its contents, you could indeed press yourself a bar of steel. Would it be inclusion free? Maybe... Could you make a straight razor? Sure! Would it be cost effective? Nope!! Environmentally friendly? After forging?? Again probably not. Pride and self satisfaction, plus the bragging rights? Damn straight! (No pun intended! lol!)

OP's question was can it be done... Yes. Yes it can. Is it practical? Way cheaper to buy a nice straight.

Wouldn't it be dangerous to bring an hermetically clased metal container with air inside, to welding heat?

This is the principle. A little different with stainless, but it is can (canister) welding. Welding stainless successfully has many of its own problems though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZPgzGggQcc

Canister welding certainly sounds like it might do the trick, but the requirement for vacuum and the fact I have no metal working experience whatsoever seems to make it implausible for me.
Still...I can't shake the desire to try.

How about using the crucible technique that was used for the Ulfberht sword?

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Originally Posted by robellison01

How about using the crucible technique that was used for the Ulfberht sword?

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Yes, but you'd need an awful lot of blades, and whatever goes into those stainless gilette blades is probably the wrong kind of steel to get dendrite growth. Of course you could probably produce a stinaless steel ingot that way. It would be expensive and impractical and definitely not 'eco'.

It could be fun though :)