Wayne - my post from a 2009 thread:
"...Some of those large misshapen holes are not the product of wear and tear - a lot of old razors, particularly pre-1900 ones, had the hole punched in them (the smaller hole in an anvil, next to the hardy hole, was used by the hole-puncher) by the forger. These take on the shape of the punch - I've seen a lot of them, and most are squarish or oblong and very wide compared to the drilled holes in more modern razors. So - at a point in time it was normal for the hole to be over-sized, and those old razors don't seem to have any more problems than the ones produced much later (if anything I think they had less problems!)...
Obviously, the hole started out being smaller/thinner but after some time the wear on the punch flattened the top an mushroomed it out a bit, so it had to be re-ground at the tip, which in time made the punch smaller and the conical part smaller and thus wider.
The impact of the punch on the still red hot steel had the effect of displacing the metal, throwing up a ridge around the hole. You can sometimes see this during restoration - a preliminary grind of the tang shows that the area around the punch mark stands proud. This is true of the makers mark, too. So - depending on the planes of the razor at the tang and amount of impact distortion in the metal, the scales grip the tang tighter than one might think. Note that these oldies never had washers between tang and inner scale surfaces either, which accounts for some of the strange grooves and wear patters you sometimes see when you disassemble them.
Regards,
Neil