This thread was born in the "How Tall is Too Tall' thread and I'm moving it here as to not hijack the other thread.
Background: I found my way to this site from a knife forum while looking for info on honing stones some time around August 2013. Got intrigued with the possibility of getting a straight razor, honing it, and actually shaving with it, mostly to prove to my self that I really could make things sharp enough to shave with. Well, I survived my first shave without drawing blood and never looked back. I love this place. I barely pay attention to knives anymore
Fast forward 66 days with about 62 shaves and three restores under my belt. I have 4 razors, two of which are 6/8 vintage straight edge blades, a buca honed GD, and a pretty little smiling 5/8 "Parabola" that reached out from the BST and said "buy me".
Smiley edges seem to make more sense to me do to the concave areas on our necks. The trouble with my smiley IMO is its daintiness. What it has in beauty is offset IMO by it's lack of heft. It has a .150 spine FH grind and I'll bet is less than half the weight of my GD. Despite the clunkiness of the GD I like the weight of it. OK, so I like heavy razors and wanted to try a 7/8 or so. I also wanted to try another smiley blade. Then Papafish posted about wanting to make a razor. OK I'm going to try this. I've worked with steel my whole life so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do it.
Pictures will be forthcoming. A generous B&B member is helping me out with a digital camera, but right now all I have is a film camera and I don't like wasting a lot of film.
Its been a while since I've done any blacksmithing work, so I decided to forge a blade in mild steel both to make sure that a piece of .25" x .75" bar was going to work out and to learn a few things. Being that the mild steel blade is just a pattern I can lay all caution aside and work and learn quickly and try out tooling ideas.
I know you can hone a smile into a razor with a straight spine, but that goes against my grain. I wanted a razor with a smiling spine. My first mistake was putting the smile into the blank before drawing out the blade. I reasoned that as I drew steel from the spine towards the edge it would tend to create a smile, but it also would be expanding into an increasing radius so maybe not. This work was done with a cross peen hammer which allows the smith to direct the direction of the expanding steel to a large degree.
OK this is getting hard without pictures. I should be able to get some up tomorrow or the next day. A piece of 0-1 tool steel is ordered and will likely be here soon.
Background: I found my way to this site from a knife forum while looking for info on honing stones some time around August 2013. Got intrigued with the possibility of getting a straight razor, honing it, and actually shaving with it, mostly to prove to my self that I really could make things sharp enough to shave with. Well, I survived my first shave without drawing blood and never looked back. I love this place. I barely pay attention to knives anymore
Fast forward 66 days with about 62 shaves and three restores under my belt. I have 4 razors, two of which are 6/8 vintage straight edge blades, a buca honed GD, and a pretty little smiling 5/8 "Parabola" that reached out from the BST and said "buy me".
Smiley edges seem to make more sense to me do to the concave areas on our necks. The trouble with my smiley IMO is its daintiness. What it has in beauty is offset IMO by it's lack of heft. It has a .150 spine FH grind and I'll bet is less than half the weight of my GD. Despite the clunkiness of the GD I like the weight of it. OK, so I like heavy razors and wanted to try a 7/8 or so. I also wanted to try another smiley blade. Then Papafish posted about wanting to make a razor. OK I'm going to try this. I've worked with steel my whole life so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do it.
Pictures will be forthcoming. A generous B&B member is helping me out with a digital camera, but right now all I have is a film camera and I don't like wasting a lot of film.
Its been a while since I've done any blacksmithing work, so I decided to forge a blade in mild steel both to make sure that a piece of .25" x .75" bar was going to work out and to learn a few things. Being that the mild steel blade is just a pattern I can lay all caution aside and work and learn quickly and try out tooling ideas.
I know you can hone a smile into a razor with a straight spine, but that goes against my grain. I wanted a razor with a smiling spine. My first mistake was putting the smile into the blank before drawing out the blade. I reasoned that as I drew steel from the spine towards the edge it would tend to create a smile, but it also would be expanding into an increasing radius so maybe not. This work was done with a cross peen hammer which allows the smith to direct the direction of the expanding steel to a large degree.
OK this is getting hard without pictures. I should be able to get some up tomorrow or the next day. A piece of 0-1 tool steel is ordered and will likely be here soon.