Thread: Japanese Straights

Very nice One of these days

One of mine (I made it). Hand forged, hand finished, 01 carbon tool steel. integral heat treating, triple quenched and normalized to around 62 HRC. Bamboo handle.

Here's pix of mine. This is also in response to a question asked about Japanese straights made from stainless steel.

When I first got this one, I made a simple enough spark test but only on the very end of the tang. Those sparks indicated a decent grade of stainless.

Because I just had to know, the last picture shows a quick etch with ferric chloride and voila, the edge is high carbon steel consistent with the Yasuki tradition. The black steel is welded to the stainless and runs about halfway up the back side of the blade. No matter how much honing, a high carbon edge is always present.

I'm very new to Japanese blades - got my first today in fact. It's am Iwasaki that I bought from our own JimR. I was so impressed that I started a thread over in the Razors section
http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...ese-razor.html

Suffice to say I was completely hooked and already thinking about asking Jim to put my name in the queue for another - but the bigger model this time just so that I can compare them.

I am wondering about stropping though. I use a SRD 3" Premium II and it seems to work very well with all of my ladies. Lately I've been looking at the Kanayama Cordovans and wondering if they could be one of the reasons behind the rumors about 1,000 Iwasaki shaves before needing a hone.

I'm going to run my own test to see how many shaves I can get from my Iwasaki before it needs a touchup - but those Kanayamas have me intrigued. I know there's an inherent grit to all strops and that the more expensive ones offered by Kanayama even state their grits to some level (around 60-80K I think). Has there been any discussions in here yet about using Japanese blades on Japanese strops and natural hones? Any real benefit there? Pretty big bucks for sure but if it's all worth it then it's money well spent. I did read an article months ago that suggested that many of the upper end Japanese blades were created with the intent that natural Japanese stones would be used for honing. I've been wondering about that ever since.

Here's Mine Can Someone Tell Me What Kind Of Razor This Is And What Is Written On The Blade

Here's my newest acquisition, a 1960's vintage Inoue Tosuke from O_S, thanks mate.

The lettering on the razor is filled with gold, though a lot of this has worn away over the years, you can still clearly see it glinting if you angle it under a bright light. You can also see this in the 2nd and 3rd photos.

Telly kindly had a look at the kanji for me, and provided the following translation (see bottom pic for colour key - thanks!

Green: Registered
Blue: Tosuke Inoue
Yellow: Special Order
Pink: Made By
Red: Kinmoji - Gold or Gold Letters

Originally Posted by OLD_SCHOOL

No not that lucky, it takes two Kanji to make Tamahagane 玉鋼. The Kanji in pink is Saku = make. In this case it is past tense and is read "made". As in made by Inoue Tosuke.

Oh well, I didn't think I'd be that lucky. However the razor is still a really super piece, thanks again to O_S for helping me out and sourcing this one.

Here is mine. Recently arrived no time to take other pics... this are "factory" pics.

here the pics .. sorry