Thread: Pakistan Razor

Folks,

Due to poor judgement on my part, I bid on and won a razor on Ebay that was made in Pakistan. The seller called it "vintage" and we both kind of screwed up.

The seller was a fine fellow of good repute, and when I discovered it was a Pakistan razor, he refunded my money IMMEDIATELY. I'm pretty sure he didn't know what he was selling. Good Show!!

However, now that I have this thing, I decided to see what all the fuss is about.

So, I decided to try honing it. I mean, what is the problem? Are they poorly made? Poor quality steel? What's the deal?

This is a fairly long post, but it might be informative for those who have never seen one.

1. Workmanship upon close examination.

The workmanship is pretty bad. The scales are some kind of odd, non-uniform plastic, maybe fake wood grain, and the pin has no collar, so it will come apart at the first opportunity. The picture on the box shows 3 pins!! but the item inside has only one.

The metal has a ground finish that looks uniform. The razor part is not too bad looking, even though the only decoration is the stamp on the tang: "Pakistan"

Looked at the edge under a microscope. Strangely (until you read the next part) all of the hone marks go generally parallel to the edge of the razor.

2. Creating a Bevel.

Okay, I started attempting to hone with my 1200 DMT. This was funny. The hone doesn't touch the blade in some places. So, I put the edge against a wooden straightedge. That edge is so crooked it looks like it was ground by a drunkard.

So, I started working on it, attempting to get a bevel on all parts of the blade.

45 minutes later, I am still grinding. Long ago I switched to the DMT 325 and was wishing I had something coarser. I got about 60% of the blade into a bevel with an edge, but the last inch or so toward the toe just will not hone out to an edge. It has a big flat on it.

And you should see the bevel. Wide in some places, almost non-existent in others. This blade was not warped, but rather it was not ground uniformly, so it is thicker in some places than others. The spine is the same way, some very wide grinding marks, some very narrow, nothing on this razor is a straight line, except that part of the bevel where I got the two sides to actually meet in a point.

Enough of this crud.

3. Polishing and shaving.

I decided to polish the part of the edge that has a bevel, just to see if I could get it to shave. Used my Norton 4k/8k, then yellow coticle.

I actually got a nice straight edge on the part where the bevel was complete, and polished it out to a pretty smooth bevel. I finally decided to put a layer of tape on the spine because in some places the bevel is too wide to deal with on a polishing stone.

I stropped it up, and shaved my arm. Nice smooth hair removal.

So, I lather up and shave my cheek.

This razor actually does shave OK. Nothing spectacular, but it wipes off whiskers and doesn't cause irritation.

It hangs up a little bit, here and there, so I am not going to use it on my chin for fear of a cut.

This could be because I really didn't have the heart to go all out polishing this edge--it just doesn't seem worth it.


So, the bottom line on this razor: it is extremely poorly made, probably by hand by an inexperienced laborer.

But the steel DOES take an edge, a pretty decent one, actually.


Final Note:

How long will it hold an edge? I will probably never know. It isn't worth my effort to keep working on this thing at this point.

If anyone wants to see if they can take it a little farther, I would be happy to ship it to them to play with. Just send me a PM.

Hey! I won't even charge you anything. But you have to post your ongoing experiences here--otherwise I will embarrass you publically!

And no guarantees the scales won't fall off while you are trying to hone it!


Now back to my Red Imp.

Well that was quite informative. After Germany the second largest producer of steel surgical instruments is Pakistan (which explains all those Pakistani razors on the Bay) . There is huge industry in that country, so the quality of steel may be OK

but they certainly have a long way to go in terms craftsmanship of making a blade. The skill and experience required to make a precise blade as a straight razor simply does not exist

I bought a lot of 16 straights from ebay. Going
through the box I found one stamped Pakistan.
I threw it in the dumpster. Thanks for the information
though.

John