Thread: Project: "Shave with Eight SE hoe razors in a row"

What's a hoe razor?
Popular around the end of the 1800's and up to, roughly, the 1930's the hoe/wedge razors is as close as you can get to shaving with a straight razor - without actually using one.
It seems like the French in particular took to this type of shaving but variations on these razors can be found in many corners of the wetshaving world.
It's argued that Samuel Henson (England) designed the very first 'hoe razor' as early as 1847.

There were a number of designs but some things are common across them all;
- they use a multi-use, removable wedge blade, and
- the blade is honed and stropped just like a straight razor.

*Note: The term 'wedge blade' is used as an umbrella term for all blades of this type even though I know it's a bit of a simplistic term.

These hoe razors introduced a number of inventions that later got adopted into other shaving tools such as the ability to adjust blade exposure and angle.

I personally find the design very visually appealing and some of these razors are near pieces of art. That, and these things were made to last!

My hoe razor 'collection'
I've happened to accumulate some really nice SE hoe razors over the year - eight of them to be precise:

Top row: L'Essor (France), Louis (France), Le Coq (France)
Middle row: Le Touriste (France), Le Coq (France), Roger (France)
Front row: Tip Top (France), Rapide (Germany)

As you can tell - mostly Frenchies.

The 'sad' thing is I have actually never shaved with one the way they were designed to be used - using an original 80+ year old blade that is honed and stropped.

That is - until today

For the next 12 days or so (I will skip a day here and there as I normally do) I will use one of these razors and see how well they perform and how feasible it would be, for me at least, to have one as my daily razor.

Thanks to gssixgun / Glen I have a freshly honed and stropped wedge blade in my possession so there is no excuse not to - that I am really curious about how they will perform.



I haven't worked out the order of how I will go through the eight razors but I'm sure that will just resolve itself as I go along.

For those curious about this, if there are any of you, I'll be posting photos and shave reports here for each razor as I go along.
If anyone is interested I can also post a video showing how I strop the blade.

What's a comparison w/out a grid? Nothing I tell you!
So, here it is, I'll fill it out as I go along over these two weeks:

And that's that.

More to follow