Thread: Making Scale Designs On The Computer

There seems to be some interest in seeing what the final, finished razor and scales will look like using the Micarta material which I made for my article on creating Micarta scale material. - http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...-material.html - Well, I’m not quite that far along yet, but the process of creating those scales suggested another small article regarding the use of the computer to help generate scale cutting and drilling designs.

Naturally, every single one of you reading this has some sort of a computer, be it Mac, PC, Linux box or whatever. If, in addition to that, you have a printer and (hopefully) a flatbed scanner, then you have all the hardware required to do pretty much the same as I typically do when creating razor scale designs.

NOTE: I’m going to cover this procedure in a very broad and very basic way - just showing you the steps which I go through along with a few tips. I would love to go into more detail, but you all have different computers, using different scanners, printers and graphics programs, so that it would just be impossible for me.

Which graphics programs to use is a large question. For photo retouch I like the Adobe Photoshop. For vector (linework) I like the Adobe Illustrator. But these are personal choices and it must be admitted that the Adobe products have always been somewhat expensive. But we are not doing anything fancy here, so almost any programs worth their salt should do the job. There is even pretty good freeware available which will do everything we need to do for this project. Two freeware programs I can suggest are The Gimp for photo retouching GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program and Inkscape for vector work Inkscape. Draw Freely.

Let’s now turn our eyes to the razor which I am planning to restore. The old scales are of some sort of wood. They are pretty beaten up and kind of overpower this blade. Surprisingly, although they appear large they are actually too short for the blade to close properly. I’m going to replace them with a new set made from my Micarta.

By the way, take a look at those rivets. Wow, are those oversized monsters, or what!? In truth, the pins are cut off nails and those round ‘heads’ are actually blobs of melted lead solder (ouch!). I’ll just reach for a metal cutting file and we can continue with the article…