Thread: Any glassworkers here?

Yes they do. You want to have firm control over every part of the assembly when the sharp-edged part of the assembly is touching your face.

Glass can be ground and made into an edged blade, but it's too brittle as has been said before. The closest thing I'm aware that's currently out on the market is "ceramic" knives. The blades of such knives are often quite thick and still pretty brittle. I actually was working with a ceramic knife over Christmas. It was total trash as a knife due to the thickness causing too much of a wedge effect when cutting. (prying apart the material rather than slicing) This was a pearing knife.

Ahh, too bad. Maybe an industrial ruby blade someday. It would be an interesting piece, for sure.

Glass scales do sound neat, though. As far as tightly pinning them, I would think as Kees suggested that a silicon washer setup not unlike the setup inside a high-end computer case for the harddrives would keep the blade from rotating too freely on the pin while still providing enough cushion to not crack the glass. As far as heaviness, all I've shaved with is a 5/8 so I don't yet have any experience with heavier blades and how they react to my arms, but I would think that I'd be able to heft a razor-sized piece of glass enough times to get the hair off of my face...

Dropping your glass-scaled razor would REALLY make you want to cry, though.

Sounds like fun, really. I'm a glassworker-in-training, so to speak, so I can chime in a little about this idea.

Glass, as we know it, is silica sand melted together, with various other ingredients added into help workability. Common glass has soda (sodium carbonate, soda ash) and lime(stone) added in, makes up most of the glass we encounter, from windshields to coke bottles, and is one of the softest forms of glass we use.

Borax can be added to the silica sand in liue of soda/lime and produces a glass with very interesting properties. The molecules are packed much more closely in borosilicate glass, and, as a result, it is both harder and stronger. Referred to as hard glass by the industry, it can be formed into pieces which are thin, lightweight, and yetl resilient. It has a higher working temperature than soft glass, and is more expensive. Items made with it are more durable and scratch resistant, however, and it therefore constitutes most laboratory glass. Wanna touch some? Go find something with the Pyrex or Kimax name on it... or to a head shop

Then, there's the glass you get when you just melt silica sand together - this is called fused quartz, and has the highest operating temperature of them all. It's also, consequentially, the hardest and most expensive. I can only think of what a razor made out of that stuff would fetch. It sure would be pretty, though.

All of the types of glass are amorphous, lacking a crystalline structure, which makes it so blades made out of them can reach near molecular thinness. The geometry of the blade would have to be rethought though, as glass doesn't have the flexibility of steel, and would break easily at the paper-thinness of severly hollow blades. One definitely shouldn't be made of soft glass, as I wouldn't trust it to carry an edge like that, and borosilicate would hold an edge much better. Fused quartz would make something possible, but the costs would be astronomical. further, it would be CRAZY to try to sharpen....

Scales could be made out of boro glass pretty easily, and could be decorated with a growing array of colors and patterns. Scales could probably survive a fall, too (not on rock/concrete, though). You could have them slightly hollow on the inside to reduce the weight factor, and put a PTFE, silicone, or urethane coating on the pins to tighten up the action. Once i've got the skill to make something like that, I promise I'll give it a shot, but my face sure won't be the first thing I try to shave with it

How's this for a follow up:

If borosilicate glass were too fragile to make a blade with, there are many suppiers to the surgical industry who use lab grown sapphires to make blades for scalpels of unparalleled sharpness (except by diamond knives, of course ). Also of course, razors made out of this stuff would be incredibly expensive, and would probably be sharp enough to shave your face right off

Both glass and sapphire would only be able to be sharpened with diamond hones, though, so there's another problem to work out.... carbide pastes etc *might* work, but I'd bet them to be very slow.

whew ... I'm still voting for carbon steel blades, but maybe the saphire would look good as scales.

X

Originally Posted by xman

whew ... I'm still voting for carbon steel blades, but maybe the saphire would look good as scales.

X

If an industrial ruby or sapphire edge would be strong enough to withstand the forces during shaving, you'd have a razor that'd never need sharpening.
Rackwell hardness of those things is beyond imagination.

You'd probably need to give it a wedge shave to make it strong enough.