Quote Originally Posted by Oakeshott View Post
Neil,
You have Rockwell C ratings for the W&B in the high 50's and I'm really surprised by that. I would have thought it was much lower. Is it your impression that this is probably a standard hardness form most of the good Sheffield manufacturers?
As Russ says, there is a lot of variation - I have seen HRC ratings of at least a couple of points lower than this for W&Bs. The main reason must be that in those days it was very much a hand-eye approach. You can imagine the difficulty of a man working in dim light trying to eyeball the colour of steel while it is being heat treated - different background light levels, how tired or how fresh he was, whether he had been on the razzle the night before, etc, etc, could all affect his judgement. As we progress into more modern times I suppose the accuracy improved, especially with the introduction of new tools and techniques. Sheffield, however, despite being the steel capital of the world and having the greatest array of alloy and bijou steels available at the time, clung to old methods - some companies continued to hand forge and grind well into the 20th C, for example.

On the whole, for the number of razors I have had in my hands, the oldest ones appear to have the most variation, although a very large number of late 1700 and early 1800s razors can still easily hold their own against modern razors - some eclipse the performance of some of most modern razors. After a while you can see trends in hardness among different makes - Bengalls all seem to be good hard steel, as do Butlers, Mappins and a host of others, while Slaters seem to be softer, for example. Most are more than capable shavers - out of the thousands of old Sheffield razors I have honed and restored, I have only ever had one back that was too soft to shave with - unfortunately it had six brothers, all in the same condition that I just keep for old times sake!

Regards,
Neil