Discovered a neat way to straighten bent corner teeth....

[TobyC]

Recipe for disaster as you've found out. You need to heat to dull cherry red, THEN LET IT COOL to room temperature before bending. This is called annealing. Just ask @TobyC

I just did a 1905 Single Ring last night with three bent corner teeth and one REALLY bent corner tooth and it came out great. I did the really bent tooth in three cycles, 1/3 of the way each time. The only downside is you lose the silver plating, which I can live with.

Never straighten bent brass without annealing first, and always work brass at room temp after annealing.


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[TobyC]

I have done a nickel plated and a silver plated OLD and the plating on both remained intact, just needed cleaning. The heat required is well below the melting point of those metals.

 

[rudyt]

I have done a nickel plated and a silver plated OLD and the plating on both remained intact, just needed cleaning. The heat required is well below the melting point of those metals.

My plating bubbled and won't polish out. I heated in a pitch dark room and only went to a very dull red. Maybe my torch was too hot.

 

[HDSledge]

My wife just walked in. I was telling her how this thread has developed with varying opinions on how best to straighten bent razor teeth from beating with a spoon to heating cherry red to anneal. She said, and I quote: "You razor people are bored." I said: "You mean boring?" To which she replied: "Isn't that the same thing?" ROFL! I guess to the casual observer our passion for old razors is curious at best.

 

[TobyC]

My plating bubbled and won't polish out. I heated in a pitch dark room and only went to a very dull red. Maybe my torch was too hot.

I don't know. I heated a nickle plated handle tube to bright red, I didn't expect it to still have plating, but when it cooled it was fine. It was dark and dirty looking, but it cleaned up and looked perfectly normal.

 

[rudyt]

I heated a nickle plated handle tube to bright red, I didn't expect it to still have plating, but when it cooled it was fine. It was dark and dirty looking, but it cleaned up and looked perfectly normal.

My Old Type is silver plated, not nickel. According to this site, silver has a melting point of about 1761F and nickel melts at 2646F. Sterling silver is 1640F.

Dull cherry-red is about 1500-1700F, so I could have easily overshot the melting point while you were not even close for nickel.

 

[TobyC]

That's possible, so,... don't do that!

 

[HDSledge]

How are gold plate and gold wash affected by the heat required to anneal brass?

btw Why do you have to heat to cherry red 1500-1700F when all you need (from wiki) for brass is 800F?

 

[TobyC]

How are gold plate and gold wash affected by the heat required to anneal brass?

btw Why do you have to heat to cherry red 1500-1700F when all you need (from wiki) for brass is 800F?

You only need to make it visibly red so you can see the glow, not bright red. You do that so you can see with your eyes that you got it hot enough, less than that and you have no way of knowing how hot it is. I've never heated a gold razor.

 

[Hoka Hey]

Gold 1,950ish F
Silver 1,750ish F
Platinum 3,150ish F
Melt temps, or close enough.

Oxy Acetylene only territory. I used to cast jewelry, rings and such. No idea how plating would act under lower heats though.

 

[rudyt]

btw Why do you have to heat to cherry red 1500-1700F when all you need (from wiki) for brass is 800F?

As Master Toby stated, it's basically the lowest visible temperature that I can positively identify. 800F is pretty dark, as is 500F, and is rather risk plate loss than tooth loss.

Your question should be "Why not buy an infra-red non-contact thermometer?"

 

[rudyt]

Gold 1,950ish F
Silver 1,750ish F
Platinum 3,150ish F
Melt temps, or close enough.

Oxy Acetylene only territory.

I can get 1700F cherry red easily with just my propane torch - no need for oxy if I'm just heading a razor head. I'm not trying to liquefy the head.

 

[rudyt]

Here's a blurry camera phone pic of the silver plating damage. Two of the corner teeth had visible stress cracks so I needed to make sure the annealing was done right. Took 3 cycles as I limited my bending to tiny amounts each time.

 

[TobyC]

Here's a blurry camera phone pic of the silver plating damage. Two of the corner teeth had visible stress cracks so I needed to make sure the annealing was done right. Took 3 cycles as I limited my bending to tiny amounts each time.

Yep, looks a little rough, but it ain't toofless!

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[rudyt]

Yep, looks a little rough, but it ain't toofless!

Did someone say "toofless"? Did you know the toothbrush was invented right here in Quebec? If it would have been invented anywhere else, it would have been called a teethbrush.

This is what happens when you don't anneal a NEW RFB before attempting a "simple" fix. When life gives you lemons, make lemon meringue pie. I need symmetry.

 

[romsitsa]

Here is a pic of my special tool, the wooden spoon. Notice the dings from razor hammering. My wife didn't. She doesn't cook very often. So far I have purposely bent and then whacked straight 5 OC's varying year manufacture, not one broke off. None were creased though. I also tried mildly heating and bending slowly another 5, all broke off. So far my experiment is a success. So confident I am that I will try it with a very expensive example next... Bwahahah! NOT!
Here is how you whack it. (Resist commenting on this one phrase if you can.) Hold the razor like so in your fingers and strike! Edge of spoon will slide down handle if you miss a bit and middle of spoon strikes the corner tooth.

Thank you for the sbs, it's clear now.

Adam

 

[TobyC]

Did someone say "toofless"? Did you know the toothbrush was invented right here in Quebec? If it would have been invented anywhere else, it would have been called a teethbrush.

This is what happens when you don't anneal a NEW RFB before attempting a "simple" fix. When life gives you lemons, make lemon meringue pie. I need symmetry.

I remember that razor!

1498: The emperor of China patents the toothbrush: hogback bristles set into a piece of bone or bamboo. Dental hygiene takes a step up.

How — or if — you cleaned your teeth before this time depended on culture and class. The chew stick, or chewing stick or toothstick, was a piece of twig. One could chew one end of the stick until it was quite frayed and then use the frayed end to brush and scrape one’s teeth.

If you had a knife handy, you could carve the other end of the stick to a sharp point to pick at the larger specks of oral detritus. And if the twig came from an aromatic tree or shrub, all the better, because you got some breath freshener in the bargain.

Some ancient Egyptian tombs included toothsticks as burial artifacts, meant to allow the departed to continue their tooth-cleaning in the afterlife. (Mummy says, “Now brush your teeth.”)

Other methods included using a cloth or rag to wash and wipe the teeth. These might be dipped in sulfur oil or a saline solution. Another practice was to just rub baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, still an ingredient in toothpastes) directly onto the teeth.

Greek and Roman texts refer to people using toothpicks to clean their teeth. If you had the money, you could buy yourself a brass or silver toothpick, often with elaborate or even ostentatious handles.

Into all this came Chinese ingenuity. Take the stiff, coarse bristles from the back of a hog’s neck, set them at right angles into a piece of bone or bamboo, and you can really brush those difficult-to-reach crevices.

News of the invention reached Europe. It didn’t catch on right off, perhaps because the local horsehair or feathers that were used there just weren’t stiff enough to do the job.

Englishman William Addis hit on the idea in the 1770s of importing coarse boar bristles from the cold climates of Siberia and northern China, and his quality mass-produced brushes sold well. The company Addis founded in 1780 is still in the brush biz today.

As the market picked up, innovation followed innovation. Meyer Rhein patented a three-row toothbrush in 1844 with large tufts of serrated bristles. Celluloid plastic brush handles appeared during World War I, when every bone available was needed to make soup.

Dr. West’s Miracle Tuft Toothbrush appeared in 1938, with bristles made of nylon, the new invention from DuPont. Timely that, as China’s civil war and the Japanese invasion had made East Asian boar bristles hard to get.

A Swiss electric toothbrush came along in 1939, but the first really successful one, Squibb’s Broxodent, didn’t hit the market until 1961. The development of smaller motors was a big help. General Electric’s first rechargeable cordless model, another big convenience, also appeared in 1961,

A 2003 survey asked Americans which of the following inventions would be the hardest to live without: the automobile, the personal computer, the cellphone, the microwave and the toothbrush. The more recent inventions trailed the pack. The century-old automobile came in second, and the five-century-old toothbrush came in first, named by 42 percent of adults and 34 percent of teens.