Thread: Frozen blade anyone?

i cant see a freezer in a house getting anywhere near cold enough to change anything on a molecular level on already forged and treated steel weather it be stainless or carbon...and besides why go though all the trouble of making warm lather just to put cold steel against your face???
ill just keep taking mine out of the cabinet and use it at room temprature

Ok, so maybe I started this thread the wrong way... Let's restart...

I've been reading from some sources that if you shave with the same blade everyday it might be detrimental to the fin to strop also everyday and you should only strop at most every 2 days. My question is: is that true?

I don't shave everyday so, from a practical point of view I don't really care weather it's true or not, it was just out of curiosity.
If I did shave everyday with the same razor I would be tempted to try and experiment stropping everyday and stropping every 2 days to see if there is a difference for the better. If that was the case I would then try to strop everyday while allowing the razor to "rest" on the freezer overnight, that's what I read you should do in some book about steel. That's not the same as putting cold steel in your face since you would strop before shaving and that way heat the steel.

Originally Posted by yoshida

Ok, so maybe I started this thread the wrong way... Let's restart...

I've been reading from some sources that if you shave with the same blade everyday it might be detrimental to the fin to strop also everyday and you should only strop at most every 2 days. My question is: is that true?

I don't shave everyday so, from a practical point of view I don't really care weather it's true or not, it was just out of curiosity.
If I did shave everyday with the same razor I would be tempted to try and experiment stropping everyday and stropping every 2 days to see if there is a difference for the better. If that was the case I would then try to strop everyday while allowing the razor to "rest" on the freezer overnight, that's what I read you should do in some book about steel. That's not the same as putting cold steel in your face since you would strop before shaving and that way heat the steel.

I cannot convince myself that a personal razor needs a rest.
A barber shop blade where it is used multiple times in a day is a
very different situation.

I am of the school that the strop straightens and work hardens the edge and that the ultra thin cutting edge anneals (softens) at room temperature just not overnight. A light trip on a strop should be all that a single personal razor needs. Your face will tell you what "enough is".

After honing or a month of sitting on the shelf more passes on the strop make sense yet each blade is different enough and each style of stropping is different enough that you should consult your face and keep a log. More importantly pay attention to a "three day average". I find that yesterdays shave has as much or more to do with todays shave than anything else.

New comers to this list see a lot about stones and honing. This makes a lot of sense because of the number of restorations folk do. For a novice with a good "shave ready" blade a balsa hone with 0.5 diamond or CrOx might prove to be the best and only hone they need for the first year but that should be discussed on another thread.

don,t know if this will answer any questions but it is along the same lines i think.when i was in a tool shop,the old guys used to tell us that the best metals for making tools(squares,angle plates,etc),were the ones that they had left the steel outside to naturally stabalize for a couple years.the gradual heat to cold to heat again made the material more stable.how this applies to the str8 in the freezer?your guess is as good as mine.

From what I understand when one heat treats (through quenching) what is happening is the austensite becomes martensite as the carbon in the steel is brought into the crystal structure- something that only happens at high temps. If the steel is left to cool slowly the carbon precipitates back out leaving you with austensic steel again (or if its cut off half way, a mixture- this is tempering) if it is quenched right away, the steel hardens before the carbon has time to precipitate and you end up with something mostly martensic. I'm not an expert on this, but I believe stainless steels are cryo treated to compress the crystal structure (which involves additives different to that of carbon steel) and bring their hardness closer to that of martensic high carbon steels. I believe cryo treatment does some, but not a lot, to help carbon steels, but a) not enough to really be worth it, and b) the temp difference between room temp and your freezer is atomically negligible. Cryo treating we are talking l-N2 cold, and heat treat we're talking hundreds of degrees.

As empirical evidence I cite the fact that my 150+ y/o Tally Ho razor has not annealed itself or softened or anything like that after many years of going from cold winters to hot summers (they didn't have climate control in 1850s, so its been cycling thermally between (conservatively) 40F and 80F, if not as high as 100F or low as -40F, depending on the previous owners lifestyle and home region.

Also, w/r/t work hardening- to work harden steel you have to take it up past its yield point right up to the plastic region, then bring it back down. I doubt anyone is stropping with enough precision to work harden their edge. (that is, enough force to make it yield, yet not enough to damage it)

Seraphim knows his mechanics. The people at Dovo are FOS. (the edge springs back almost entirely almost instantly, if it is going to)

EDIT: I guess NiTiNOL and other memory things *could* do this but it requires heat, not cooling.

New to straight razors.. . .but the previous post about the metal structure is correct. . .the characteristics of the metal are directly related to what range the elevated temperature takes the metal too and at what rate it is cooled.. .Depending on the temperature the blade is raised to, certain crystal structures will form. . .then depending on the how quickly it is cooled the grains of the metal will grow/decrease in size as well as shape which directly effects the hardness and ductility of the metal

For what you are taking about the difference between room temperature and a freezer would not give you a noticable difference. . .if you were to use a cold quenchant on the blade it would likely have an effect. . .but im not sure if this would be good or bad