Hello,

So, after considering it for a bout a year or so, I finally decided to jump into the world of straight razor shaving. It came time to buy another $20 pack of Mach 3 Turbo cartridges, and instead of gritting my teeth and shelling out the dough again, I figured now was the time to make the switch and put the money into a longer term solution. After some exploration of this site (which is incredible by the way) I picked up a DOVO from Vintage Blades, LLC and a Poor Man's Strop Kit from Whipped Dog. Everything arrived last week and I'm 2 (very slow) shaves in! I can tell this will take some time to learn, but I feel that this will be very rewarding.

I did make one careless mistake though. During my first shave, out of force of habit I lowered the blade into the water-filled sink, and (just like I would do with my Mach 3) shook it around to clear the cream and stubble. Well, as I'm sure you can guess, I knocked the edge of the toe of the blade against the side of the porcelain basin. Afterwords I closely inspected the blade and noticed an ever so slight imperfection right near the toe on the edge of the blade. It's not bent at all, but when I shine a light directly on it, I can se a small speck of light reflecting back at me off of the edge. Is this something that will work itself out with regular stropping, or it is an immediate problem that I need to send the blade away to get repaired? I haven't noticed any problems in performance, but I've only used it twice so I probably wouldn't know what I'm looking for anyway.

Thanks for this wonderful resource, and I'm glad to be a part of the community!