Nationwide Campus Injector

I must have gotten a good one. Admittedly, I was shameless in my begging for a "special reserve" example. Goes to show you- always be nice to the cute sounding girls taking your order.

Build quality is nothing to write home about, but it's adequate, and the grip is, in fact, pretty nice. Don't even bother with the face scraping Personnas- go with the Schicks. I can barely load the Personnas, with their crappy plastic mechanism.

My only complaint is that I can't get a BBS shave with this. Sure, I can use it pie eyed standing on one foot in a wind tunnel, and if you can't figure out how to use it in ten seconds, I want to play cards with you. It's just that we've grown accustomed to exceptional results, and try as I may, I just can't close enough. Sure does make for a quick one pass shave, though.

In all honesty, it's better than my old bakelite handled Schick, but not as good as my L series. Injectors are a lot of fun, and everyone should have at least one.

I happen to enjoy this razor quite a bit. Its rather easy to shave with, not brainless....but it does a smooth and decent shave at a pretty fast clip. I'm not throwing out my DE's and straights....ever. But lets face it, I enjoy variety in shaving. Thats why I've got a closet full of stuff. So the NWC Injector is a very welcome change of pace.

I think the build quality is fine. This isn't a $100 razor, but I'd say its at least worth the retail price we paid (shipping was included to US which was an added bonus B&B hooked up for us)

Once I mastered the angle, and how this worked (it was the first and last injector I've used) I get consistent close, smooth, & comfortable shaves. Btw - Pressure is Not needed!

OK, much has been said about the Nationwide Campus (NWC) injector. Time to get to the facts. Here are the contestants:


Thew NWC razor is on the right, and my old friend the Schick injector is on the left. I am not much of a razor guru, so I am not sure which Schick type this is, but I am sure someone will chime in on the discussion thread.

A few words of background. I am not a huge Injector fan. I keep one around for travel, and the occasional change of pace, but I find that the shave is lacking relative to a DE. That being said, you can get an OK shave at a rapid clip from one of these things, and the learning curve is near zero if you are used to cartridge razors.

As for blades, for a while I was using the Personnas available pretty much anywhere. They give a decent, but uninspiring, shave. Switching to Schick blades (available from Amazon, among other places), makes a huge difference. Much more comfortable, closer shaves. Also, the metal cartridge loads blades much easier than the plastic Personnas. All my tests were with Schick blades

I used each razor for a week of shaves, varying between soaps and creams. If you are impatient and want to cut to the chase, my opinion is that the NWC razor is pretty lousy, and you are better off picking up an original Schick razor off eBay or elsewhere.

On to my experience. First, the NWC razor is one big honkin' razor. It has a quite long handle, as you can see in the picture, and it is coated with some sort of nonstick rubber stuff. It looks fairly futuruistic; not my cup of tea, but not too bad. Loading the razor I had my first annoyance. After injecting a blade, I noticed that one end wasn't fully in the razor by about a millimeter or so. I tried to push the blade in with my thumbnail, but the entire bottom piece of the head moved instead. It is a bit hard to explain, but the razor head is two pieces held together by a clip (same on both blades); the NWC razor is not as tight as the Schick, which makes me a bit nervous.

And the shave? The first time I used it, I used it like a DE. No pressure. I just let the weight of the razor do its job. It seemed like a really nice, comfortable shave during the actual process. However, after finishing up and applying some aftershave, my face felt completely stubbly. Darn. I looked horrible after about 3-4 hours at work as the stubble came back, and I was mighty perturbed.

The next day I decided to apply a bit of pressure to get a closer shave. I was able to improve things to a point, but I got a lot of razor burn and a barely adequate shave. No BBS to be found here. I muddled on for a week, and was quite unhappy with the results. If you like comfort at the expense of closeness, this razor might be for you, but that is not my particular style.

The next week, switching back to the Schick razor, was night and day. Very close, comfortable shaves with little irritation. In my opinion, the NWC razor can't hold a candle to the classic. But why?

Let's have a closer look. Here is the NWC:

Notice that the blade exposure is quite low to begin with, and the safety bar is concave. Since there is little exposure, you need to apply pressure, and since the exposure varies across the razor head, you get plenty of irritation as you gi for BBS shaves.

Here is the Schick injector:

Nice and straight across, uniform blade exposure, and a decent gap to get nice and close.

So there you have it. I am not a fan of the NWC razor. This review, obviously, relates to my particular razors. If you want to discuss further, direct commentary here.

edit: as some of you may remember, I had a devil of a time with NWC on our group buy. They never bothered to reply to my e-mails when I sent them. In the end I decided to not do business with them. After that, a number of fine gentlemen from this forum contacted me and offered to send me a razor. After some initial rejection, one member in particular insisted that he send me a razor to review, which I did.