Dealing with a Warped Gold Dollar

[Fish Slayer]

I am working on a Gold dollar 66 and have removed the heal stabilizers and re shaped the toe a bit. The problem is the spine is not exactly straight, that is if I put it on a stone it will contact the spine at the toe and the heal on one side and if I flip it over it rocks. The warp is fairly small, I am guessing about 0.005 inch of daylight when I put a straight edge to the concave side.

I see two options, one is to lap it flat. The concave side will be easy, but the convex side may give me some challenges. I would start on the concave side, trying to keep the wear at the toe and heal even until I am contacting along the entire spine. When I work the other side, I can measure the thickness of the spine at the toe and heal and try to work it so they come out the same thickness. Keeping the spine from rocking will be the most difficult part.

The other option would be to try and bend it straight. I saw a technique using 3 sections of drill rod and a vise to straighten warped razors.

I like the lapping option because as Slash has pointed out, GD66s are a bit thick in the spine and can use some thinning. The difficult part will be the convex side. I also do not know if the warp will affect the cutting edge any.
The bending method has merit as even if I end up lapping the spine thinner, I will not have to deal with one side rocking and would probably address any possible issues at the cutting edge. The biggest risk is that I may end up with razor pieces.

What advice can I get from those with experience?

 

[pmaster]

For $3, I'd say trash it and get another one. However I am also interested in this as I've had to deal with more than a few warped razors lately and realized that it can be quite a pain to hone in some cases. The problem being that if its warped enough, it will pretty much always end up having a frown if you hone it normally until all of the edge touches.

The only way I've found is to hone it rocking on one side, and trail it on the edge of the stone on the other side...

 

[Chaloney]

I have an imperial razor co 6/8 that is warped similarly. I use lapping film on a marble edge tile. On each grit I first hone it flat, which gets it sharp at the toe and heel--on the side that rocks I hone with the heel end flat for some of the laps and with the toe end flat on the rest of the laps. Then I slide the film onto the curved part of the tile and do x-stroke half laps on each side for about 3 times as many laps as it took for the toe/heel ends. I had tried it with roughly the same number of laps but there is so little of the blade in contact that it takes a lot more laps to get the same amount of steel removed. Once I got through 12,5,3,1, and 1 micron with paper, it was the first blade I ever got to cut on the hht-- 3 to 4 on the whole blade. Shaves great too. I call this "thinking outside the rocks". I didn't like the idea of lapping film to hone straight razors until I tried it.

 

[Loner16]

This is an easy fix in three steps..

Step 1. Remove trash can lid
Step 2. Insert Gold Dollar
Step 3. Replace lid

Done!!

 

[Fish Slayer]

I appreciate the suggesting and opinions, and I get dealing with a troublesome $6 razor does not make sense financially, but starting out with a GD means that you are going to have to work around / fix shortcomings. I will have to measure the warp but it is small, I estimate that the gap is the thickness of a sheet of paper (0.005 inches).

It may go in the trash without ever cutting a hair, but I would like to try fixing it, even if it ends up cracking in a vice, I will have learned if you can get away with bending one or not, either that or $6 worth of amusement.

 

[bluesman 7]

I would definitely go with the lapping method, with the addition that, when lapping the concave side, I would keep in mind staying parallel to the blade edge. In other words you may not be taking the same amount off of the heel and toe. Once the concave side is flat, I don't think you will have trouble with the convex side, just go slow and keep measuring.

I would surely do this over the trashing it idea, if you didn't want to solve problems you would have bought a shave ready razor. 5 thousandths is not going to take much work at all IMO.

 

[Fish Slayer]

I took a closer look at the blade and worked on measuring the gap on the concave side. I could not remember which side was concave and which was convex so I laid it down on a cast iron band saw table and tried to determine which side rocked. Neither rocked….

So I laid it against an engineering square so that I could hold it up to the light to see which side had the gap and…. This time both sides had a gap in the middle…. Calipers confirmed that the spine near the toe and heal is about 0.004” thicker than the spine at the middle of the blade. I went back to the cast iron table top and measured the gap on one side to be around 0.002 (by using feeler gauges). So the spine is not warped, as close as I can measure, but it does have a bit of a dogbone shape, which should be easy enough to flatten.

I suppose I initially saw what I expected to see, I noticed the convex shape on one side of the blade and expected to see a concave on the other. Looking a bit more critically indicates a totally different situation.

I am thinking that a blade like this could pose a real exercise in frustration if one tried to home it on a narrow stone, like a 30mm wide coticule without first flattening the spine. As it is, my sandpaper, film and marble tile are wider than the length of the blade, so it should lap out without undue difficulties.