Thread: Argosy anyone?

Another addition to my growing batch of eBay rescues. I picked this up for 99 pence a while back and left it on the back burner while I worked out what I wanted to do with it. Blade is 5/8", half-hollow (Henckels IV1/2) jimped above and below. The tang is engraved with "ARGOSY" on the front and "GERMAN HOLLOW GROUND" on the reverse. I haven't been able to find any reference to Argosy anywhere so don't have any idea about the manufacturer, I'd guess by the style and scale material it likely belongs to the latter 1/4 of the 19th century.

As you can see it was a bit of a basket case; the horn scales were extremely dry and starting to delaminate, lead wedge was cracked from the pin hole and the blade very badly pitted. On the plus side the blade was actually fairly sound and hone wear less than the size of the smile at the toe end would suggest. Then to add insult to injury, during dismantling, a bit of kack-handedness on my part resulted in some damage around the pin holes at the hinge end

Not wanting to discard the originals I came up with a plan for the scales. After dismantling the scales were soaked in neetsfoot then sanded up to 2500 grit then finished with a fine polishing compound.

A large fancy brass washer hid the damage I'd inflicted around the pin hole and looked rather fetching into the bargain!
Restoring the blade to as-new could only be done at the expense of the engraving so I did what I could on the buff starting on a sissel mop and working thru' coarse, medium and fine mops/compounds. Took quite a few hours but I think it came out well without messing up the engraving - shiney but still showing plenty of age.

The broken lead spacer was replaced with a nice new shiney piece of aluminium


Finally, I'm happy to report that it's an excellent shaver!

Awesome job!! And a great shaver too, double whammy!!