1st Time with Gold Dollar

Well, I picked one of these up earlier on the year and hones it up recently. The steel is good enough but boy the quality control leaves a little to be desired. When you look down the blade the grind on either side is extremely uneven. Were they going after a kamisori look? One of the days I might put a set of homemade scales on it.

I can see where this would be an inexpensive way to get into the world of straight razors sa the steel is more than adequate to "get the job done." They have a long way to go to match the aesthetics of a more typical straight razor.

Thoughts?

It has been reported those with an asymetrical grind are uncommon, maybe 1 in 20. Most guys just bin them. The other option is to spend a good bit of time on a 320 diamond plate and remove some spine. As far as shave-ability, IMO, they work just as well as most vintage American steel. The key is in prep, thinning the spine, fixing the stabilizer, etc... New scales will only help.

Mike H said:

It has been reported those with an asymetrical grind are uncommon, maybe 1 in 20. Most guys just bin them. The other option is to spend a good bit of time on a 320 diamond plate and remove some spine. As far as shave-ability, IMO, they work just as well as most vintage American steel. The key is in prep, thinning the spine, fixing the stabilizer, etc... New scales will only help.

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+1.

It is steel. Razors are made from steel. What you have is a piece of steel already roughly shaped sort of like a razor. If you remove all steel that is not part of a razor, what you have left is a razor, of as high a quality as you care to make it. You can pull it out of its crappy blue box and be shaving with it in an hour or two, or you can put 300 hours into it, and pin it between scales of unborn baby mammoth ivory and 14k gold pins and washers. Up to you. Some beautiful razors have been made from those RSO's, or Razor Shaped Objects.

With the #66 in particular, most of the bad grinding involves leaving too much steel, and not taking away too much. So most can be fixed by simply removing steel from whare it needs removing.







First pic is a typical GD66, stock. Second is a stock one and one that has been worked on a bit, side by side for comparison. Third one is nearly in its finished shape.

Dont be gentle with these things. I use a belt sander clamped into a bench vise for preliminary grinding. Then I go to 60 grit hand sanding, and progress through 2000 grit, with a couple of revisits to the belt sander to fine tune things. Finally, I polish with scraps of old lapping film, then diamond paste in different grades, up through .1u. And I just do very plain and simple mods. Some guys here make works of art out of them, but they still shave just fine.

Listen to Slash. And read his posts in the subject in other threads. He is one of the resident Gold Dollar experts, and I am learning much from him myself. Good luck with your razor!

Beautiful blade, Slash.

Yes, the steel is OK but the grinding is really poor. Quite a few need work to reduce the size of the stabilizers to allow them to sit flat on a hone. That is why they are not recommended for beginners unless the blade has already been modified by someone that knows what they are doing.

Yup, they can be as good as any other razor out there.

You just have to remove the unnecessary stuff

There are some high-zoot razors out there with stabilizers just as bad as a Gold Dollars:

Seraphim said:

There are some high-zoot razors out there with stabilizers just as bad as a Gold Dollars:

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Yikes!