I'm a lucky mentor! WI.
Western Wisconsin Mentoring
A nice afternoon spent as a mentor.
Yesterday I received a call in the morning from Dan Byerly. Dan is a mature student at the university here. He has straight razor shaved for more than three years and wanted to get together to talk razors. Great idea!
He arrived at my place and waited for me to get back from the dump where about 6 cubic yards of my storm downed branches went.
Dan brought along about ten razors he had found and honed. He also brought a couple barber hones and gave his opinion of them. He was correct. He also told me of his self taught honing routine. I saw nothing wrong with it at all and listened for tips I might use. When a man is happy shaving with razors he has honed, he needs no shaving or honing lessons. He also brought me a gift of a Hjelstrand razor box!
We talked about razors in general and re-scaling while enjoying some espresso. I asked if he had a couple hours available and he said yes. We went into the basement and he selected some material I had that is very much like the Vulcanite / hard rubber but is acrylic. We found a Hjelstrand frameback blade in fair shape and set a preliminary bevel on it. From there we ( mainly Dan ) flattened the scale blanks, taped them together and cut them out on the bandsaw after drawing the outlines. Dan contoured the scales on the one inch belt sander and finished by wet sanding them
He domed a rivet head one on one end of a couple brass pins and I showed him how to add the washers to the pin. I showed the assembly and started the second pinning and he took over and finished the pinning of both ends and finished contouring the wedge end.
A bit of wet sanding again at 1200 and a bit of polish and the razor is ready to hone and then re-peen and refine the pins after they loosen a bit from bevel setting.
The time was about two hours or so broken up by a neighbor coming to use a tool. "Good neighbors deserve use of tools!"
All in all a great day for me and Dan left smiling, to study for his college finals.
