Thread: hand forged razor

Some people have asked me to post the picture of my first hand forged razor and here's the result. The picture isn't all that great. Maybe I'll have some better pictures later. It's definitely a shaver, though.

This looks great! When do you think you would be taking orders on customs?

Ivo

Nice job Robert Hopefully I'll be able to emulate one fine day.

I like that 'swayback' design!

You do not see too many of those these day's. I guess you just have to do like Robert, make it yourself!

Fantastic!

So, what are the scales made out of??

C utz

Robert, it is awesome work! What type of steel and hardness is it?

Nenad

That looks really good.
Are these razors something that you intend to make available for custom orders? Or is this something you just wanted to do for yourself?
Regards,
Alex

I'm still in what I consider R&D and refinement phases of this. The process is time consuming and I'm not ready to take any orders. I want to make sure I've got something I'm happy with and that I've got good control over the process first. This razor is made of 1095 and, although I don't have a rockwell tester, I would guess it's approximately 64 HRC. It's very, very hard and I tempered at only 350 degrees, which had little and possibly no impact on it as far as stress reduction and softening. I figured razors are brittle and that's something we've all learned to live with, so I wanted to keep it as close to quenching hardness as possible - at least for this particular test. That's what the R&D is about and so far, I'm quite pleased.

I probably won't be able to make another one for a couple of weeks because I've got a big worklog right now, but I'm looking forward to it. I've also got one I forged from 0-1 that I'm also testing and tweaking.

Chris, the scales on this are Diamondwood.

That's pretty hard. What did you use to hone it?

I used DMT hones to get down as close as I could to the final bevel. The Swaty seemed to be the most effective of the barber hones I tried. Some of the barber hones were pretty ineffective. All the hones left a finer edge than I normally expect from them, probably due to their agressiveness being tempered by the hard steel. Finishing off with .05 diamond paste on a paddle strop worked well.

Robert,
Good looking razor.