my 'little' project

Recently I received a package in the mail from an ebay purchase. I open up the box and find the biggest load of garbage ever. I literally had to toss out half of what was in there (I only bought the stuff for a wade and butcher wedge which is nice but unfortunately has cracked horn scales, and a barber hone which is also decent)

From the rest, I manage to find a decent looking wedge and a pair of black scales that i'll use to fit my wapienica.

Also in the rubbish, I managed to salvage a pair of what I originally thought might be real tortoise scales. A quick attempt at cleaning revealed that they were actually blonde horn scales which had been painted faux tortoise (not the first time I've heard of this). Unfortunately, the wedge end looked like it had been previously shortened and the pivot end has a crack so I'll probably only have 4.25" of good usable material.

I stopped cleaning the scales to show the difference of what they looked like:
http://www.geocities.com/eric_kluk/100_0445.JPG

Now you may be thinking, what are you gonna do with 4" scales!? Fortunately, also in the lot there was a 7/16 Shumate's Barber razor which except for a huge 1/4" chip the middle of the blade was in fairly decent conditon (even bevel and only slight hone wear). So I cut that puppy in half and made a now usable straight (and very mini) razor

http://www.geocities.com/eric_kluk/100_0438.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/eric_kluk/100_0446.JPG

The razor edge is now only 1.5" long and by the time I hone out the small chip in the edge, it will probably be a 3/8

I can't stand to let anything usable go to waste (especially such nice horn scales) and i think this will be a fun little experiment. Now that I think of it, I may be able to use the horn scales off the W&B for another small blade I have.

I think this might be a handy little razor to get into some tricky areas. This razor might just turn out to be the ultimate travel razor too!

Here's the Shumate beside the Wade and Butcher that I got for comparison.

http://www.geocities.com/eric_kluk/100_0449.JPG

Really puts into perspective how ridiculously small this thing is!

I bought a lot of 6 that the blades have been shortened about 1/2". I'm thinking the guy either had round points and wanted spikes or he just liked a shorter blade. Wonder if there'd be a market for them if I cleaned/honed them?

There's a market for nearly everything!

OOof, be careful of the projects that you think are going to take an hour to do. I'm currently trying to find time for working on two razors that I have that were supposed to be 'simple' projects :( !

trust me, i already know this will be an on and off project taking a few months. the scales have to be reshaped and cleaned and fitted. the blade needs to be cleaned, honed and have the toe end cleaned up and only then can i put it all back together.

i have about 36 blades that are ahead in the pecking order for restoration *sigh*