Thread: Interesting patent removable back razor.

Originally Posted by Mike Blue

And to include Zephyr's comment about simplifying production... both answers are yes. Once of the first items a blademaker would notice is the lack of weight at the spine. This allows a thinner blade to be useful for shaving because the softer/harder tubing/spring device allows the correct angle for honing when the spine of the blade will not deliver it. It's also much easier to do a flat grind on a thin piece so there would be no need for a variety of diameters to get the hollow grinding right. Less tooling equals money savings on the factory floor and in speed of production.

That might also translate into a lighter razor and tailor to the end-user's preference but that's a guess on my part. It would be useful to see some company advertising to know if they used it that way.

From a simple production perspective, a thinner piece of steel means that less of the good steel is wasted on non-cutting edge parts of the blade. With a thin spine being supported by a much less expensive piece of support material, potentially means more per volume per pound steel available for making more razors and more profit for the company. Each element of production savings means more at the bottom line.

Other ideas that free float in my head this morning are that it may be possible to adjust the spine support to help recover from some edge warpage. A straight spine tube or spring would provide a guide to correct a problem like that if the razor was then "adjustable" to good enough. Less razors tossed in the scrap means more sold out the door.

Hopefully these are useful suppositions..

seeing as this tube design is quite old, I would guess it simply exists to cut down on the use of steel. High quality steel necessary for razors takes a lot more effort than regular iron and is much easier to work with. Id guess like in japan how soft iron is/was clad over harder steel when steel wasnt so readily available it would have simply been cheeper and made sense to use less of the expensive steel.

Originally Posted by justinA

seeing as this tube design is quite old, I would guess it simply exists to cut down on the use of steel. High quality steel necessary for razors takes a lot more effort than regular iron and is much easier to work with. Id guess like in japan how soft iron is/was clad over harder steel when steel wasnt so readily available it would have simply been cheeper and made sense to use less of the expensive steel.

No need to guess, this is the most likely reason, but archeometallurgists like to argue about it nontheless and so some uncertainty must be retained. Once the difference between iron and steel became more evident, the combination of a steel tooth on an iron spine became quite common. My opinion is that the Chinese developed these techniques long before the iron age was described by western European historians, and spread both to the east via Korea, eventually into Japan and to the west via the Hittites. The welding technique is very common among tool-smithing cultures the world over and is hard to separate out as to who really was the first to develop it. Steel was much more valuable than iron regardless.