Thread: How did you begin - first razor, shave, etc

I false-started about six years ago. Was reading about straights on the forums, LOVED the look of them and the concept of shaving with such time-tested tools of our forefathers. Got four razors honed by a member of this forum (spectacular edges, btw). Gave it a try. Bloodsport. Quit after seven or eight attempts on weekends only due to how long it was taking me to shave so carefully.
Fast forward to the beginning of the pandemic. Needing a distraction and loving everything wet shaving, I decided to try straights again. Read about razors, grinds, honing (almost derailed me) and watched videos about shaving technique. Lots of reading, lots of learning. This time around I started slow and kept at it. Very light touch. Did not force extra passes. Did not try for BBS. Loved the experience. Been shaving exclusively with straights for just over a year. Love em'!

Originally Posted by octoserge

I false-started about six years ago. Was reading about straights on the forums, LOVED the look of them and the concept of shaving with such time-tested tools of our forefathers. Got four razors honed by a member of this forum (spectacular edges, btw). Gave it a try. Bloodsport. Quit after seven or eight attempts on weekends only due to how long it was taking me to shave so carefully.
Fast forward to the beginning of the pandemic. Needing a distraction and loving everything wet shaving, I decided to try straights again. Read about razors, grinds, honing (almost derailed me) and watched videos about shaving technique. Lots of reading, lots of learning. This time around I started slow and kept at it. Very light touch. Did not force extra passes. Did not try for BBS. Loved the experience. Been shaving exclusively with straights for just over a year. Love em'!

Good deal! Glad you found success at last. Persistence is the key.

I guess it was around 35 years ago. I had been using a DE for sometime and just happened to see an article about straight razors somewhere. Around the same time I just happened to stumble upon the original SRP site (Yahoo Groups). So, I decided to try. I bought a TI (which was sharp out of the box) and that was the beginning. I think my first soaps and bowls were from Col. Conk.

As they say, the rest is history.

Oikay, I'll have a go. I was walking around the new Riverwalk Mall in New Orleans, I guess about 30 or 40 years ago. More like 38 I think. Pre-internet. I knew my Grandpa had a straight razor given to him by his dad, but he used a Gillette 3 piece, don't know the model. Anyway my first shave, some decades previous, was with a Gillette Super Adjsutable, the one with the black handle, and a Personna 74 blade, or maybe the Gillette Spoiler, I don't know. I used both. Went through the whole business with newfangled cartridges, then the Trac II, and of course it was canned goo right from the start. Anyway back to the Riverwalk. There was a knife shop and I was just looking. They had a Dovo razor and the owner saw me admiring it, said Dovo made the world's best straight razors. I knew it was no good without a strop, and he didn't sell those. I assumed that since it was brand new, it was still sharp enough to shave with. Naturally, right?

So I bought it. A Best Quality. Cool. The best quality from the world's best straight razor company. I was stoked! Took it home. Tried to shave. It didn't shave but it did half skin me. I tried stropping on a belt. Leather, right? Just like a regular strop, except I already had several and I couldn't find a strop strop, so I used my belt strop. Still didn't work. I stropped that thing for literally thousands of laps No joy. So I figured I needed to sharpen it on a stone. I knew knives. I knew stones. I was a fisherman and a seaman. I worked with knives every day. So I sharpened the razor. No joy. I asked a barber, he explained that I needed to keep the spine on the stone. Tried that. No cigar. Asked a different barber. He GAVE me what now I know was a coticule, and explained a little about slurry, and I sharpened it again. After a thousand or so laps with slurry, I had a bevel and it would shave arm hair as good as my pocketknife. But the problem was, it wouldn't shave my face. It was torture. My pocketknife actually shaved my face with less trauma!

Okay so I figured that barber didn't know what he was talking about or he gave me a stone that belonged in the trash, and that's where mine went. I tried India stones. Arkansas stones. Sandpaper. I shaved, but it wasn't nothing pretty. But the straight razor was now my shaving method. Or scraping method. Then, in a hardware store in Matamoros I found a huge natural stone, kinda translucent. This rascal was a foot long and wide as my hand. It was obviously a LOT finer than my arkansas stones, even my Smith Tri-hone, I think it was. I just needed a finer stone, says I. Well, that stone didn't seem to do anything at all. If I had known better I would have lapped it, and honed with a much lighter oil. I put thousands of laps on that razor. Every time I shaved, a few hundred more. I realized that the toe was getting worn on one side of the razor, and the heel on the other. So I started forcing the issue, using lots of pressure. Then I went back to the soft and medium arkies for a while. Then the fine one. Eventually I figured out that my stones, except for the big dino-stone, were dished and it was affecting my edges. It was fine on my work knives, but I realized that the razor needed a flatter bevel. Things were starting to come together for me.

So I started blaming the razor. Found a Boker, I think, in a junk shop (the sign even said junk shop) in I think Palacios, TX, and whaddaya know... it honed right up and I shaved with it, best shave ever. Looked like I only spent HALF the morning sorting wildcats. Over the next few years, my honing got better, my shaves got better, and the Dovo went over the side, Knowing what I know now, I could have made it shave just fine, but I still wasn't there yet. So the vintage was my daily driver. By this time I had a strop, given to me by another friendly barber. Years passed, Al Gore invented the internet, and I discovered that I could learn just about ANYTHING at 14,400 baud. Eventually found B&B and then I had mentors, sources, how-tos, and all that. My shaving success improved within days, literally. Along the way I had tried another Best Quality, and a Col. Conk, with no more success than with the first Dovo, but I had a couple more junk shop and flea market rescues, and a bunch of rocks and stuff, and I had progressed through boar, black badger, and pure badger brushes, Williams and VDH soaps, and other stuff. The online scene opened up more possibilities and horizons and I opened up my wallet and jumped in with both feet.

Then I learned about lapping film from Seraphim, one of my mentors, and left the stone age behind. Chinese silvertip brushes were a game changer. I started hearing about balsa stropping and pastes, starting with a Whipped Dog strop kit, and several of us started refining the process. I restored some razors, and discovered cheap fodder for modding, in the Gold Dollar 66, and created some razors that I was quite proud of. I learned a bit about smithing, and made a few razors in the bbq grill and a hole in the ground, out of 1084, 1095, leaf springs, old files, old saws, and some were not bad. some kinda sucked, but they were mine. Vintage blades captured my attention again, and I lucked into a pair of Bismarck #2's and really liked them. Modded a few more Gold Dollars incorporating the best features of that razor. I badmouthed Dovo endlessly until someone loaned me a Dovo Bismarck. Hey, not bad!

So I tried a few more new razors. The King Cutter was reintroduced after a long hiatus and I snagged one. Then a Prima Klang. A few Japanese razors, a Heljestrand, a couple of English razors and other German razors. By this time the lapping film and balsa Method were out of the lab and ready for prime time, and me and others started teaching that. Teaching a new method of doing something that only 10 or 15 years previous, I barely had a clue about. All from the internet. A bit full of myself, I explored other forums, including this one, under previous management, and managed to get myself banned by bucking a very strong bias against the brand that everyone loves to hate except the newbie and the budget constrained, the Gold Dollar. At that time there were several in the community that honed and sold them. I found a yahoo group dedicated to the GD and I mean dedicated. Militant GD users. So hardcore, my modified Gold Dollars were regarded as near blasphemy. Now, I dabble in selling them. (on vacation now.)

The shop is coming together in bits and dregs. As soon as I build my twin grinder I will probably start making razors again, but this time I have a thermostatically controlled Paragon kiln and a bucket of genuine Park 50.

So there's my straight razor past, and possibly my straight razor future. I have other types of razors, but most days it's a straight razor for me, usually either one of my Gold Dollars or one of my 6 or 7 Bismarcks. I love the Bismarck but the GD, that's like the little razor that could. There is something about buying a razor for way south of $5 and shaving with it that strikes a chord in me somehow.