Brownbear
10-23-2010, 01:52 PM
Went to my local barber shop for a haircut today. This is a hybrid classic barber shop (hunting and fishing and motorcycle magazines, workingman's decor and so on but one of the younger barber's sports 4 gauge ear plugs) with one middle aged barber and one semi retired old guy in residence this morning. I mentioned to them that I was starting to shave with a straight and it generated a lot of discussion, it being a slow morning. They stopped shaving customers in the 80s but clearly had a lot of experience prior to that. I left the shop with the end of an alum block to make my fingers stickier to stretch my skin and the promise that they would give me one of their old used lather machines when they drug it out of the closet.
Asked about my soap and we had a discussion about the locally available Williamns and VDH. The barber was of the opinion that the VDH wasn't any good because it had that jelly stuff in it (the store only carries the glycerin based pucks) and that you couldn't get a good lather out of Williams any more. Said it was just thin and frothy. He rooted around in his closet and pulled out a paper bag with a puck of Williams the likes of which I had never seen. It was brown, had totally different stamping on top and bottom and smelled wonderfully like tallow. He said he had bought large quantities from the barber's supply, it was his last puck. I would have offered to buy it from him but it didn't seem right.
The older fellow, maybe mid 60's wanted to talk about my strop. He asked what I treated it with and recommended either just rubbing my hand on it or putting it in the sun (on one of our rare days with sun) and rubbing fat from a steak on it. He didn't think much of the idea of using lather, although he said that is what he used on his hone. He also said "you are going to cut your stop" (hah, been there, done that) and that he didn't use a cloth strop except to clean the blade. I think when my Screaming Pig strop gets here I'll take it in to show him, he was really interested in where you buy a strop these days and how much it costs.
He had some other really interesting things to say. Said you could have a razor that was your favorite, use it all day for weeks and then one day it just wouldn't work. No matter what you did to it, it just wouldn't work. You'd throw it in a box and get out one of your other ones and use it till it stopped working, then pull the other one out after a year or 6 months and it would be working again. He mentioned this twice with an air of wonder at the magic of it. He had several razors in his rotation and put each of them aside to rest for several months and they would be good again.
I asked him how he kept his razors sharp and he used a barber's hone with lather every three days or so and stropping in between. Didn't seem to ever send them out for more formal honing. I may take a hone and razor in on a slow day sometime and ask him to demonstrate how he would use the barber's hone.
It was an interesting conversation, I hope they weren't kidding about the lather machine, that would be fun to try. But echoing Thebigspendur's response to my thread about razor types, neither of these guys talked about type of razor or brand or grind, it was all about technique and the nuances of maintenance. I got the impression they bought whatever razors the barber's supply shop had and didn't think too much about it.
Asked about my soap and we had a discussion about the locally available Williamns and VDH. The barber was of the opinion that the VDH wasn't any good because it had that jelly stuff in it (the store only carries the glycerin based pucks) and that you couldn't get a good lather out of Williams any more. Said it was just thin and frothy. He rooted around in his closet and pulled out a paper bag with a puck of Williams the likes of which I had never seen. It was brown, had totally different stamping on top and bottom and smelled wonderfully like tallow. He said he had bought large quantities from the barber's supply, it was his last puck. I would have offered to buy it from him but it didn't seem right.
The older fellow, maybe mid 60's wanted to talk about my strop. He asked what I treated it with and recommended either just rubbing my hand on it or putting it in the sun (on one of our rare days with sun) and rubbing fat from a steak on it. He didn't think much of the idea of using lather, although he said that is what he used on his hone. He also said "you are going to cut your stop" (hah, been there, done that) and that he didn't use a cloth strop except to clean the blade. I think when my Screaming Pig strop gets here I'll take it in to show him, he was really interested in where you buy a strop these days and how much it costs.
He had some other really interesting things to say. Said you could have a razor that was your favorite, use it all day for weeks and then one day it just wouldn't work. No matter what you did to it, it just wouldn't work. You'd throw it in a box and get out one of your other ones and use it till it stopped working, then pull the other one out after a year or 6 months and it would be working again. He mentioned this twice with an air of wonder at the magic of it. He had several razors in his rotation and put each of them aside to rest for several months and they would be good again.
I asked him how he kept his razors sharp and he used a barber's hone with lather every three days or so and stropping in between. Didn't seem to ever send them out for more formal honing. I may take a hone and razor in on a slow day sometime and ask him to demonstrate how he would use the barber's hone.
It was an interesting conversation, I hope they weren't kidding about the lather machine, that would be fun to try. But echoing Thebigspendur's response to my thread about razor types, neither of these guys talked about type of razor or brand or grind, it was all about technique and the nuances of maintenance. I got the impression they bought whatever razors the barber's supply shop had and didn't think too much about it.