Quote Originally Posted by PaulFLUS View Post
Whoa! That was a lot.

I admit I didn't read all or even most of all that but just on the surface it seems a lot like work to buy razors for the purpose of toiling over. Why not buy things that are free form all the problems, are made of decent steel and are worth having once you're done? Remember, once you have done all that messing around with it you still have cheap Chinese made crap. It reminds me of the adage, "you can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure."

I get the adventure aspect and the for the sake of the endeavor part I guess but my thought is, if you want to do a bunch of work to a blade why not make them yourself?

That's just my thoughts. I bought one or two and did what you are doing and at the end of it all I had significantly improved mediocre razors with no real or even palpable value. You'll never be able to sell it and recoup a mere pittance for your efforts.

If the point is to learn it seems to me that these don't really represent well anything that you would want to keep anyway. And, again, if you want to really get an understanding of what goes into repair and correcting blade geometry make some yourself. You don't have to forge them. Get some bar stock or some old large files and anneal them in a stoked charcoal fire and shape them by stock removal. That's how I got started.

Then, at the end of it all, once you have learned what it takes for it to take shape, take a bevel and shave plus learned how to craft one you will end up with a one of a kind, custom razor.
I wasn't thinking of buying them at all. I was looking for something else while I was waiting for a few NOS razors to arrive. I guess it might be because I searched vintage razors on eBay, AliExpress started to push customized ads to me. When I saw those dirt cheap with free delivery RSOs, I suddenly had an idea to grab a few and see how good or rather how bad they could be. I bet those might arrive earlier than those NOSes and indeed they arrived just after the Le Jaguar(a bummer just like my Dovo Astrale). Tracking of the others stopped updating for two weeks now...