Thread: Suggestions for an engineer

I am a young guy, with some old habits. I collect and make full use of fountain pens, pocket knives, and straight razors. As an engineer though, I am always looking for pieces that are as technically interesting as they are aesthetic.

Anyone have suggestions, along these lines, for straight razors? (i.e. unusual materials or designs)

Interesting subject.

I actually have 2 suggestions for you:

1. A lot of folks who do professional honing use some fairly sophisticated microscopes to evaluate edges. You may find that as an engineer, you could get quite a bit of entertainment and satisfaction from this kind of analasys and honing with some of the more exotic synthetic hones.

2. Some razors are hardened with some fairly technical processes like cryogenic tempering. You might do some reading up on that, although the means to do it yourself are well out of reach for 99.99% of us.

Cryo tempering is simply the process of taking an already hardened blade and cooling it to below a certain temperature. I believe its -300 fahrenheit or something. You can do it by dipping the blade in liquid nitrogen. Does it work? Not for most carbon steels. SS otoh...

Can't say that razors are all that complicated. Unless you go to the molecular level, razors are just pieces of hardened steel ground into shape and sharpened. Scales are...scales.

Maybe you can get into reapplying gold wash or gold plating. That might be neat. I might have to hit you up if you do start getting into that.

I think you'll find that honing is about as technical as you can get with straight razors. There's a ton of information out there from experiments to microscopic pictures of edges, plus theory surrounding it. Besides that, it's about as cut and dry as anything can get. Sure, you have your more desirable blades and your exotic scales, but that's not terribly interesting from a scientific standpoint.

The most interesting aspect of straights to me is the history behind them. It's pretty satisfying to know that your shaving instrument is as old or older than your grandparents.

If Seraphim would hurry up and get that ceramic razor together that would fit the bill perfectly!