Thread: Razor making how to for smiths

This is going to be an article on how to make a razor. There are many ways to go about this. Some people will do it differently. Some makers whose work I respect a lot work differently. This is just how I work, and it works for me.

At a high level, it goes something like this: I start with stock, and forge a razor blank to shape. I anneal it, grind / file it to shape, and do heat treatment. Then comes the finish grinding, polishing, and making scales. At that point it is ready for honing and test shaving.

During the process, I don’t use center lines, I don’t measure angles, and with a couple of specific exceptions, I don’t measure anything. It’s all eyeballing and ‘that looks about right’ engineering. In this article, I will work on the assumption that if you want to follow it, you already know basic forging, metal working and heat treatment.

I will use Damascus for this project. It should go without saying that you should work with materials that are suitable, and that you are confident in working. A razor can be a tricky thing to make correctly in terms of geometry. Before you move on to expensive materials, you will want to be confident in your skills, know how to recover from mistakes, and have enough experience to recognize the first signs that things are about to go pear shaped so that you can correct in time.

A good steel for razors should have enough carbon (0.7% or up), have a fine grain, and be free from many of the alloys used in knife steels. The only requirements for a razor steel are that it can take a fine edge and be honed by a human. A razors edge is not subject to shearing forces or impact. It does not need to be wear resistant. That means that 52100, M42, Hitachi blue steel, while excellent knife steels are not good choices for a razor.
They are extremely difficult to work, especially the post heat treatment grinding and polishing. They fight you every step of the way. When get to the honing stage, it will be a dog to hone because it is so wear resistant it is like whittling down your stones. And in the end, the edge will probably not be as fine as if you chose plain carbon steel.

Then there is oil vs water. A hollow ground razor can easily crack or warp during water quenching if the hollows on both sides are not identical. And even then, it may crack if it hardens differentially. And because of the thickness of the spine, that can happen. With oil that is usually far less an issue.
When it comes to regular steel, my preference is O2. It is in my opinion the best steel for a razor. It has .95% carbon, Manganese which makes it harden nicely, and nothing much else. It also produces edges that are fine, strong, smooth, and yet pretty easy to hone. It is not available in the US anymore, so we usually tell beginners to use O1 instead because it is a pretty good general purpose steel. The Tungsten makes it fight a bit harder than is ideal, but the heat treatment is straight forward, and quenching is safe.

In this case the Damascus I use is an O2/L6 mix which is made for me by Howard Clark. Howard makes it for me without precision grinding it. It would be pointless for him to precision grind it only for me to throw it in the fire and hit it with a hammer. It might look like precision ground stock in the pic, but that is only because he is just that good with a power hammer.



The first thing I do is grind the sides clean to double check there are no welding issues, and to grind away any evidence of the last fold. It’s been my experience that if you get rid of the lines that show the last time it was folded, the odds of it splitting when I hammer it are drastically reduced.