Thread: My first two razors, ready for heat treat

Hi everyone, just wanted to say how excellent this forum was, and to share with you my first razor project.

I learned a lot from reading through the archives here about how to make a razor. I'm not claiming that I do know how of course, but reading stuff here answered questions I had and surely saved me a ton of time with trial and error. So now I've got two roughly razor shaped hunks of metal, ready for heat treat.

Based on various threads here I opted to start out with O1 steel since its cheap, relatively easy to work, and by all accounts performs well as a razor. I got a bar of 1x0.250" from Jantz for like $15, which is enough for 3 razors!

I think the idea expressed here of "remove everything that isn't a razor" is a good guiding principle. I have a decent machine shop at work which I can use after hours, so I've been using the kinds of tools you find in a machine shop. I made myself a jig to hold my blanks at an angle to allow easy milling to get the rough taper angle on the blade part, and bought a carbide insert mill off ebay. Between the mill, metal bandsaw, sanders, and a buffer, I've managed to get the shape about right. I ground the hollows with a 6" rubber sanding wheel I bought from Caswell.

On one blank the edge got a bit thin perhaps for O1 pre-heattreat; about 1.5mm. The other one I made a little thicker, so the edge is 2mm. The handles are milled down to about 4.3mm. Hopefully they won't warp. The first one took a while since I had to figure out what I was doing, but the second one took only 2 hours to go from blank to the state in the picture.

One downside to O1 is heat treating. On the plus side its simple enough to do yourself, though I don't feel up to that at the moment. But it does seem less predictable than some of the air hardening steels, which I could just send out to one of the knife supply companies to do. After reading here, I'm going to PM someone off this board to see if they will do it for me.

Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out!