Thread: Why all the Mystery Steel???

One more thought: I'm not at all certain that the new generations of wonder steels are terribly well suited for straight razors, nor has there been anywhere near the experimentation with the heat treating schemes necessary to produce optimal results for razors. The stresses that razor edges are under aren't very analogous to those of knives or chisels or drills, they aren't subject to high temperatures, they have extremely narrow honing angles, they must be sharpenable to a much finer edge than knives and chisels, and so forth. And you can't fake out the buyers with marketing prose or grandiose claims, because if the steel isn't great for this application, and if the heat treating isn't great for this application, then the result isn't that he can only cut through 10 ropes instead of 15 - the result is that it pulls his whiskers out by the roots.

Meanwhile Dovo and TI have their steels which in some cases they have been using for 40+ years and have the hardening and tempering regimens to extract the maximum performance out of it. For the smaller shops, old-fashioned steels like O1, W2, 440C have been around long enough and are well-understood enough that it is easy to get the required results out of them. Some of the most respected stainless razors around are the old Henckels Friodurs and dubl duck and C-Mon stainless razors, which were made from 440C with really outstanding hardening and tempering regimens, and those razors are hard to beat even today. There are quite a few vintage razors made from unknown carbon steel that I prefer to modern razors made from O1 or C136 or some of these other wondersteels. While it would be nice to know just what steel Waterville used, I'd rather shave with it than some razor using a "name-brand" steel that nonetheless doesn't shave as well.