Second razor spotted, just like this one.
In a place I can't direct attention to until it's over.
The presence of two lends credence to this thing being legit.
The second one is being sold by someone else. Not Glasgow. His is still up so it's not the same one.
I see it now... in the wildest auction I've ever seen in my life.
This razor is the Shroud of Turin of safety razors.
Ok, if the teeth were cut out by hand, then the question remains - cut out from what? There is still the matter of metal appearing where none existed before.
And then the second, identical super speed from a different seller also has that O on it, and while I do not see a date code - the handle suggests that it is from the same time period.
IOW, is there another Gillette SS bed that does not have the cutouts you pointed out?
Not an SS. Only thing that comes to mind would be one of the old open comb tto's, but to the best of my knowledge, none of those had that crimp in them except for the british models, and that's a US head.
And in that case we would still have metal where none was before - in that solid bar guard going across the front of the combs.
Here is my theory:
If you look at the one auction picture, you can see the most used one is the "prototype". Also, the auction is from Massachusetts. That means there is a darn good chance this person may have either worked on the line or worked for Gillette. Given the use of the prototype razor, including the amount of soap build up, perhaps this was a prototype like the current iPhone 4g, that they let employees use and test, to determine if it would be a good idea/sell well. While it might not have been good enough for production, the people liked it so much, they kept using them.
OR
The slotted comb instead of open comb violated another companies design patent, which prevented Gillette from marketing it.