Thread: My latest acquisitions, A E.A Berg with etching.

Yesterday I finally entered the antique store just a few hundred meters from where I live. I haven't bothered before thinking I will never find anything use full but I was very wrong. He had several nice razors but one really stood out.
It was a Erik Anton Berg with what I believe are ivory scales. There is very slight hone wear but it manage to shave my arm hair as it is now. There is also some rust on it but it appears to be mostly on the surface.
I would like to polish it up before I hone it but I don't want to remove the etching. Will Autosol (MAAS) work? Or what should I use?

This will be very nice razor after restauration work.

In answer to your question; autosol will probably remove the etching. It is a nice etching, but in all probability it will be lost in restoring. Murphy's law of straight razor restoring dictates the pitting will always be just a tad deeper than the eching/stamping/marks

On the other hand, Erik Anton Berg made some great razors, and yours will be fabulous after you had it restored.

Check out this link to see GSsixgun (Glenn) make short work of some gold wash in order to get a nice working shaver out of a razor in need of restoring. That post taught me a lot about what is important and what is not.

Best of luck.

I tried yesterday using a que tip and some Autosol to polish the blade ever so lightly just to see what happens to the etching and it faded quite quickly.
However, the etching seems to be pretty deep and I was thinking it might be possible to polish it up and then rub in some black paint or something to make it more visible again. I might loose the etching forever but unfortunately the blade is just ugly enough to need the polish. If it where a little bit better I think I would leave it as it is and just polish up the tang.

I have been trying to figure out more about the etching but I have only found that the crossed arrows and crown is a symbol of the province of Dalarna in Sweden. I would really like to find out what the A, H and 1 stands for. There is also a symbol in the center that I can't make out. If anybody happens to have any knowledge of what it might be please let me know.

EDIT: So I managed to find out what it actually says on the blade and it is Å&H and the number one. Å%H, Åhlén and Holm, was a Swedish post order company established in 1899 in a smal town in Dalarna. It is still in buisness today under the name Åhléns, a very big chain here in Sweden.

I finally come around to this razor today and started polishing it. Man, it will look just great once I finished and the etching will still be there. There was some slight rust at the pivot point but it seems to leave minimal pitting. I ran out of Autosol so I will have to get back to it later but I estimate perhaps 15-20 hours of polishing to get it back to mint condition.

I just hope it will shave as well as it looks once it's finished.