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08-16-2012, 05:50 PM #17
This is the curse of being a writer, I have a permanent case of L'esprit d'escalier. Now that I've sat on it for a day I know better how to say what I mean about it.
I think it's very likely that the people who made it thought it was made of wootz, hence the sanskrit on the blade. By this point in history we've got a lot clearer idea of what the stuff was -- this razor ain't it -- but I'm guessing that whoever bought the steel for Joseph Rodgers thought it was.
My basic thinking here is that the earlier the blade was made, the more likely it was actual imported material and not just ad-copy. At the very least, I've never seen another (non-Stodart) razor with the Sanskrit on it.
There are a few swords and daggers over here that are just breathtaking. I, personally, would feel REALLY icky buying anything like that. Too many friends in archaeology and anthropology. But I sure do like to look at them.
I sure wouldn't mind having a real wootz... well, anything.... And indeed Mike Blue had things to say.
It's going to go into my regular shaving rotation. I'm a fan of the hunkahunka-style wedge, and all my Rodgers steel shaves great.
As for restoration, nothing but 2k sandpaper and metal polish. I want the patina, but I also want the gritty stuff off.
See my reply below to Mike on one other thing I may do...
The scales are warped and badly reglued at the toe, so those I'm going to take fully apart, soak, straighten, polish and reassemble. I've done enough horn resto at this point to know that these scales are going to be obscenely beautiful when cleaned and polished. They're going to wear their age like a General wears his medals.
I know that the Royal Society got a batch of wootz billets in the 1790's, it's what they had Stodart working on. For his part, Stodart claimed that using the rhodium and iridium+osmium steel alloys he was able to create steel that took the classic wootz pattern. To the best of my knowledge none of his samples are around (and the two razors that showed up here on the forum certainly didn't exhibit wootz patterning).
After reading every word I can find about Stodart, I've come to think of him as one of those guys whose enthusiasm is just a little contagious. Maybe the results he and Faraday were getting weren't quite as good as he thought they were, but he was such a brilliant guy and so convinced, that he convinced other people too even when the evidence wasn't as good as that.
Then again, one of the writers for the 1832 Edinburgh encyclopedia claimed to have samples that Stodart had given him and ten years on the control steel was patinated and Stodart's alloys weren't. That was fully ten years after Stodart's death. I hesitate to try and get CSquared to etch either of the Stodart razors he's got.
As for this Rodgers, it's an easy enough thing to polish up a spot on the pile side and etch it a little. Just to see what happens. I'm guessing what happens is the same thing that happens to all other carbon steel.