Thread: Some rather basic questions...

I have a number of old razors which belonged to my father (and some possibly to his father too) and want to restore them. I am a fairly accomplished amateur woodworker and well used to to grinding and honing chisel and plane blades and have a good set of Arkansas stones of different grades.

I have already honed the best looking one - a Hunter Bros razor from a hundred or more years ago - but to remove all the chips in the blade I had to do quite a bit of honing, first on a diamond stone then up through the Arkansas grades finishing off with a good strop. This has left the honing area quite wide and in spite of some hand polishing the hollows still have some pitting. It occurs to me that I should grind then polish the hollows, but to do this properly it seems to me that I need a wheel of precisely the right diameter to reproduce the hollow accurately and none of my grinders can accommodate such a large wheel. My workshop is small and I dont want to buy and instal kit I will rarely use. Suggestions?

Another of the razors has only a single hollow. Should the flat side be honed flat, like a plane blade or carpenter's chisel, or should it be given a very slight bevel, like a carver's gouge? In its current state it has a slight bevel. The razor has a British Government broadarrow mark stamped onto it which suggests it was a military issue. My grandfather was too old to fight in the first world war so it was probably my father's from the second world war during which he served in the Royal Marines.