Antique Shop Dry Spell Over/ 3 Hole Blade Question

[CGW409]

Over the last couple of weeks my RAD fueled excursions have come up dry but made a pretty good haul yesterday.

The cased razor (pics 1 & 2)was badly tarnished and suffered a badly cracked handle but a little marine epoxy has set that right and has cleaned up nicely.
From what I've been able turn up the cased Old Type is a 1920's Brownie but several things are giving me pause (1) from what I've found the Brownie should have no serial # but I can barely make out a series of numbers(completely unreadable)on the lower plate (2) the blade bank with a Brownie should have GILLETTE BLADES spelled out on the top end cap and have the little D depression as well this one has no lock dent and has the Gillette diamond (3) when I picked up the blade bank it felt heavy and I thought I had a load of old rusted blades as pic 3 shows I have 5 NOS (the 3 unwrapped blades have wrapper residue so most likely the wrap dry rotted away) with the date code of 847, from what I've been able to find out in regards to the blade date codes 8 should be the year and 47 the week so unless I read the date code wrong those should be 47th week of 1918.
I'm wondering if I might not have a 1917/1918 service set that somehow ended up in a Brownie case since the razor and bank are a dead on match for that set.
The blades are what amazed me,not a speck of rust(I popped the wrap on one)though I'm pretty sure nearly a century of bouncing around in the bank with no wrap has rendered the naked blades too dull for use but I plan on giving one of the wrapped blades a whirl.
Razor #2 was a NEW stripped of all plating but she polished up into a real nice steampunk shaver.
Not a bad haul for 25.00

[MacDaddy]

I'm wondering if I might not have a 1917/1918 service set that somehow ended up in a Brownie case since the razor and bank are a dead on match for that set.

Well, if you do have a serial number on the guard plate (and you should also have the patent date inscription on the handle, as well) then you can pretty safely say that the razor and case are a mismatch. Unless you can make out at least the first letter of the serial number I wouldn't count on the date code from the blade to tell you much of anything. It might have been a later purchase by the original owner or, even more likely, just lumped together by someone with a pile of Gillette stuff somewhere in more recent history.

The one thing you could say is that that style blade case is certainly a possible match for a serial-numbered ball-end Old Type. They could have come together in a military set or in any of the other civilian model sets.

Try rubbing a black crayon into the serial numbers and wiping away the excess to see if that doesn't make them more legible.

[CGW409]

I'll give the crayon trick a go and see if that works.

[CGW409]

Tried the crayon trick and the numbers are either just too far gone or the stamping die misfired and didn't strike hard enough(most likely as the plating is still intact)about all I can make out is either an I or a J (only the upper part of the letter is readable)at about the mid point of the number followed by what might be a couple of 1's towards where the end should be.