p38thadl's Quest for Excalibur

The Armory: Weishi 9306-H, 1964 Travel Tech, Schmidt R10, Rimei 2003 (with Merkur clone handle), Gillette NEW LC, Baili half-sider DEvette (with Schmidt R10 handle), Razorock JAWS (on Rimei handle)
The Stable: JDK Shenzhen (unbranded) nylon, Semogue 620, Ever-Ready 250D
and on the Round Table: Stirling Gin and Tonic, Stirling Almond Creme, Arko, Kiss My Face, KMF+VDH croap, PPF+Whoo's The Man (glycerine).

We join our adventure on the sixth day, with a Feather blade. Attempting to maintain a low angle of pitch during WTG reduction (pass 1) didn't prevent weepers entirely, but did make for an unusually comfortable shave. I chose this brand for my difficulty with it. My hope is to put the cavalier attitude behind me and impose the just rule of chivalry unto my face.

I've been trying to get to the bottom of a Feather AC pro blade. 18 shaves so far, still a great shave.

Good luck with your quest!

Thanks, Larry! I really want to be a Feather fan, as I think their product line is nearly a minimalist ideal. I just wish it didn't involve proprietary blades. (My only "straight" is a Sedef shavette.) I've never had great luck coaxing such a sharp DE blade down into my follicles, though. I wonder if Feather views DE as a slacker's device, for beard reduction only.

Congrats and welcome to the madness! I've eyed a few ACs but have yet to pull the trigger.

Best of luck and see you around.

Can't believe 18 shaves, Larry! That's pretty remarkable in my book!

Thanks for the welcome. Yesterday I shaved at the gym after swimming, and affirmed that there's more to prep than hydration. I tried ATG for pass 1 under the jaw, and that didn't get me anywhere fast, either.

So I'm gonna break it down stroke by stroke. Where the flesh is deep, on my cheek, under jaw, I can make low angle work -- lesson learned from my first shave in Excalibur. Where it's fleshy but backed by bone, on moustache, chin and jaw corners, I'm going steep -- lesson learned from going Guardless. Where it's concave or poorly backed, on neck and in the buttresses, plus the jawline, moderate angles with skewing, which I'll just call "slanting" from now on -- what basic DE technique ought to be.

That last entails XTGish strokes, but I wish to emphasize, really it's the pitch that is determining my approach. I perceive no inherent advantage to striking a hair sideways, allowing rotation away from the cut. I am a two-pass shaver, and I think ATG is perfectly OK. This is merely a different way of presenting a low angle to the hair, still square to the direction of growth, without the full mechanical advantage of the top cap.

After a week and a day battling the Feather, I have extinguished its fire. Was it the state of wear on the edge, or the technique outlined above? I guess I won't know until the next blade. The question now is, SHOULD there be a next Feather. As I've said, I cannot safely evacuate my follicles with such sharpness. Today's shave, while exceedingly fine and smooth, shows visibly less clean than pink alabaster around my chin.

Because of my background in Guardless, I conceive of the problem as the intersection of a rod, a ring, and a wedge in three dimensions, where the ring is the skin at the lip of the hair follicle, and the rod is the hair coming through it at any of various directions. One usually wants the bottom surface of the wedge -- blade edge -- to displace the ring downward. The skin will rebound after the cut, and the hair will fall below its level, for BBS.

Being a narrower wedge, sharp blades do not succeed in this as well as less acute, smooth ones. Unless your hair is very thick, in which case the greater diameter traversed results in greater vertical displacement. My hair is more of a thin wire, however. A better approach for my type is to displace the skin before the cut even begins, sliding the edge down the length of the hair.

That manoever (ATG) requires a fairly blunt edge indeed. One that will not initiate the cut too high, at a low angle, or cut into the skin at a moderate angle. The problem that then arises, in the back part of the wedge, is too much contact with the skin; friction decreasing the useful skin tension and diminishing cutting power. That's where secondary bevels, as in Astra SP, come in, reducing the angle on the back end.

I may be able to live with the kind of performance I got from the Feather today, IF it proves rewarding in the long run. However, I do think I will take out my shims and maybe go back to the Weishi, even. I don't see any use for blade exposure with such a blade, or any hope for BBS. It's just a question of whether I can still get skin-safe angles.

Today's shave was a definite step backward, in closeness, comfort, and in a way, time. Without shims, the edge was largely cutting above skin level, and putting pressure on the guard at jaw corners, in particular, didn't work out. Cheeks and underjaw (low angle) did get smooth, but not at the level of comfort I've come to expect.

A year ago, I have to admit, this probably would have been an okay shave. The difference between then and now: I could have (should have, actually) finished in one pass today, whereas it would have taken three, complete, grain-oriented passes then. That efficiency would obviously diminish blade wear, but I hope none of my fellow knights would ever settle for this.

I have to rethink my neck, which actually turned out pretty well today. Slanting interacts with the emergent angle of the hair to require more of a steep angle, which I realized as soon as I laid out my plan a couple posts back. Although I used to "j-hook" all the time under my jaw, some adjustments are required now that I'm focused on the crease. It is a hook WTG, but a scoop ATG, and touch-ups at speed just work better keeping it steep.

Can I slide XTG at a steep angle? Seems like that could slice skin as much as hair. On the other hand, the follicle ring may be sort of standing on end, and rolling out flat during the cut. I'll approach that cautiously.

I followed my intuition (finally) and went to the Weishi 9306. Best shave yet! I always call that razor idiot-proof, but maybe "genius-proof" also applies. No, my IQ isn't actually that high, mainly because I am so D-- slow. I'm very near to achieving a one-pass shave, however, which will give me that much more time to think.

The "new" stroke (which I've been using on my neck for a long time) worked awsome over bony areas, at least with the exposure controlled. I could hear it picking up things that steep angle missed. Just as skewing presents a low-er effective angle to the hair, it makes steep angle steeper. (Yay, more geometry!) Blade edge effectively thicker, too, which should help the Excalibur cause. These effects complement the lower range of pitch angles relative to the razor's frame of reference. It points to a possible resolution between conventional wisdom and what I learned -- the hard way -- to be safe for my skin.

But I noticed that the second pass ATG, as a whole, was doing less good for my appearance than harm. Not that I got burned, this time. No blood, either. Aftershave went on cool, and heated up slowly. It's just that I could just see blotches appearing under the skin -- capillaries breaking -- as the razor passed. So it's going to be one pass with touch-ups next time. That ought to save some blade!

The Weishi often gets labelled as a too-mild razor, but I found mine to be a nice effective shaver; I don't care about aggression classification or whatnot, as long as the result is good. Actually, the only reason I found B&B in the first place is I broke my Weishi from overtightening it too often and the search for a new razor brought me here via Google.

No luck with the one-pass shave this time... socially acceptable only, and I cheated some actual, cutting XTG into touch-ups under the jaw, too. (Should have been 1.5 passes, in other words.) Is my blade losing its edge? My knightly training says, never assume that. I was most likely mistaken in my perceptions regarding the necessity of ATG. I think I know how I can lighten it up, though, with higher velocity.

I would argue, and many would agree, WTG can always be slid XTG. What if XTG was always supposed to be just a skewed ATG?

I cashed in all the skin from my slacker shave yesterday and gave myself a BBS for Mom. ATG cut deeper than XTG, but was less effcient, missing more hairs, presumably taking more skin.

Took the last lather as a postshave, skin was fine, but I think I can follow the sequence more deliberately to save strokes.

WTG-XTG-ATG, Blah-blah-blah. Progressive reduction, blah-blah. I COULD describe today's shave in those terms, but it would be misleading in two important respects. First, as mentioned above, my "XTG" is skewed to present the edge to the beard at a different angle; in other words, or in a different frame of reference, a sliding ATG. Second, I was "reducing" the beard well below skin level, and people who speak of "reduction" tend to believe that's not advisable, I would think nearly identical to the "no pressure" crowd.

And I guess that's what I'm figuring out right now, how a sliding, slicing edge can be SAFER to skin, even operating within the follicles. Well, for one thing, it misses less hair, initiating the cut more easily. That would also mean less depth in the follicle, the only explanation I can come up with (besides the unacceptable, "dullness") why a more direct ATG would cut deeper. I also think it goes back to the motion defining a frame of reference for the geometry. The edge is "thicker" and therefore "duller" along that vector. You just really, really, have to pick a good pitch angle, that opposes hair, but not skin.

Suddenly I'm excited to reconsider Bosse's XTG-ATG approach. Could XTG also present enough "gap" along that motion vector to circumvent the need for reduction above skin level?

I had once fooled around skipping WTG with my DEvette, and it made for two extra-tuggy but efficient passes. By coincidence, I was late this morning, and doing a 10-minute, Arko-only shave anyway.

The Weishi showed its Super Speed roots and pulled through with another DFS. A little on the light side, but nice and even. It felt as though I got all of the cheek hair (BBS), even though it doesn't look clean. Thinner hair there. It was disconcerting to have "blade skipping" back on the menu of possible errors, too.

Yeah -- still too high; I need more reduction. I think today I just succeeded in bringing my finishing strokes to the surface. If I had to shave twice in a day, maybe this would be my plan of attack.

I can't stand going to bed with a beard, so I took a chance on my skin and went for the midnight shave, stepping up the blade exposure with the Schmidt R10 (an Edwin Jagger clone). Despite a complete prep routine and three passes, it was horrendously loud, way too many touch-ups, frightening slants... I would absolutely pitch the blade, under normal circumstances, and may yet.

But, the shave was completed successfully. Result like most these past couple weeks: very fine, very close, just not deep enough to be smooth as a baby's bottom. One pinprick during the shave closed before its conclusion, but I did raise a couple bumps, which for me portends late-onset burn. So I skipped the alcohol splash and went right to my hydroxy acids: pumpkin juice with an overlay of "psoriasis" cream (generic Dermarest). Good stuff for nighttime anyway, really. Will see how I feel about it in the morning.

Yesterday's shave held up well, 19 hours, and was not painful. One of the bumps matured into some sort of tiny, infected cut, which I squeezed prior to today's shave without further incident. To avoid damage today, I went light. Skimming at high velocity to even out the first pass, on lather remnants rubbed in with wet hands. Then a second WTG skewed the other way, or sliding XTG, depending on the frame of reference. More skimming, and finally a flurry of high-velocity ATG, just to cut the tips "right."

The result is a close, comfortable shave, but the effort was all out of proportion. I choose to validate a termination rule already established, not to go ATG with a blade that isn't performing well WTG. Still, choosing the less harmful path, I gained a brief glimpse of glory. The blade HAS revealed its true nature, just as the legend foretold: Feather cuts too high on me. If I wished, I think I could persist in an indefinite series of socially acceptable shaves, and work on improving the skin condition. (Dollar Tree generic Aqua Velva burning on contact today.) It is I, not the blade, who has failed the test.

I think I'm pretty sure where this is going, having exhausted the Feather in both safety and guardless razors. Personna was my blade in the DEvette. I wonder if Astra SP, the blade I first learned to shave with, or Rapira, also well-tuned to my face, can vie for the title when the safety bar is in play. But the blade that revealed what BBS *is* is not very sharp at all: Racer, typically also the shortest-lived at 3-5 good shaves.

But what if I apply the techniques learned here with the Feather, and just remain open to performance that differs from (BBS) expectations? I selected the NEW LC today to balance the gentleness of this blade, and felt my skin exhausted at 2 passes: WTGx2 above the jawline, WTG-ATG below, for a close, comfortable shave. Some odd stubble on my cheek tells me to upgrade the second pass there to a more consistent XTG, but it's at least correct for the appearance of shadow, given the density gradient.

Today was the flea market opening, and as a representative of shaving, I dug for the BBS, missing only one side of my underjaw. Began to regret it when I found myself exposed to direct sunlight for hours (wife disappeared my canopy), but it seems I'm okay this evening. It feels a bit too deep, and I did manage to give myself a little slice with an (intended) steep-slant stroke on my moustache. However, with careful finger placement, it felt like a pretty safe shave compared to what I've been doing lately with the Feather!

ATG, I simply used the same angles employed WTG, skewing freely, and in tight spots where moderate angles were employed, I used the safer (steep or shallow) angle of the surrounding area first. This does feel like a new consolidation, a lower energy state as far as the mental work.

Hey, you know what makes a great sunburn cure? Same as my go-to razor burn cure: pumpkin juice push-up popsicle applied directly, let it dry down, then disperse a single dab of generic Dermarest on fingertips.

Racer and 100% slanting made a perfectly gentle, even shave after yesterday's overexposure, and this was a morning shave following a mid-day shave, making it all the more critical. It was that very cusp of BBS, where the beard seems to retract as the skin dries down and relaxes. Oh, and I forgot to mention yesterday, I went back to #1, the Rimei 2003, with no shims. I wonder if I can coax a deeper shave out of this blade tomorrow... when I'd normally be looking to toss it!

p38thadl said:

Hey, you know what makes a great sunburn cure? ...

Click to expand...

I was gonna say Gin & tonic. Have enough and your sunburn doesn't hurt anymore.

Well that's just aftershave from the inside, right? Fits well with my low-salt diet theory of why my beard is so damn hard.