Thread: Quite antique razor

What a nice razor Roberto, and a nice, sympathetic restoration which keeps all the nuances of the razor's history intact - well done!

Of course, the scales are probably not original - the pins were wrong at both pivot and wedge, the wedge being pinned by what we call a clout or hob nail - they used to be hammered into the thick soles of leather boots and were very popular a long time ago - I have a bag of them from 1940. The original scales would have been made of horn - usually!

If they are original then they have had an injury at one or other end, resulting in shortening the scales. The only merit I can see in this theory is that if the owner replaced the blades original scales with hand-made wooden ones, surely he would have chosen the correct length? I guess we will never know...

I don't know what the wood is either, except that it looks to be too coarse in the grain to be a hardwood, but that might just be the pics and the staining and age. Obviously they are quite old.

Another interesting point are the small notches at the wedge end - it reminds me of split scales that have been fixed by tying string or wire around the wedge, the notches help to keep the string/wire in place. If that blade was in those scales at the time of this string/wire repair, then it looks like the tip of the blade would have cut the repair, so I suppose the other owner may simply have installed the blade in a set of scales that he already had, that were damaged before swapping them and which were too short...

Regards,
Neil