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Question about a Goodwill.

At my suggestion, a friend of mine bought this. I told him I thought the handle had been "upgraded". Wouldn't this have originally had a ball end handle, and am I correct in thinking that this handle is not original?

Or is this not a Goodwill?


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It's a Goodwill #175 and the handle is not original. As you said, these came with ball end handles.

They didn't make many of these #175, and they were produced only in 1931.

Nice razor btw!
 
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You can see the open slot on the ends of the baseplate, should that be that way or were they slotless?
 
You can see the open slot on the ends of the baseplate, should that be that way or were they slotless?

That's what makes it a #175 instead of a #160. The Goodwill #175 had the slot as a regular NEW.

Here's another one with a bar handle ... I think these weren't around in 1931 but I might be wrong. Porter will know for sure.

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Here's a cased one that CFM sold, but eBay already removed the pics, this is all you can see on Google:

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It's a Goodwill #175 and the handle is not original. As you said, these came with ball end handles.

They didn't make many of these #175, and they were produced only in 1931.

Nice razor btw!

That is a very impressive catch! I would not have been able to ID that as a #175 based only on those original pictures (although I can see how you did it after viewing the rest of this thread).
Your eye for detail is remarkable. You get a gold star!
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I think these weren't around in 1931 but I might be wrong. Porter will know for sure.

I don't believe the bar handles were around quite that early either, and, while I've seen plenty of Goodwill heads matched up with bar handles, I've not seen any that were reliably original enough for me to be comfortable saying that they definitely came that way. However, this was an extremely turbulent time for Gillette as a company not to mention the economy as a whole, and with all the other mixing and matching they seemed to have done during this time it would be hard to definitively rule anything out.

That said, in looking through some of my Goodwills and NEWs here this afternoon I noticed something that I hadn't caught before. I've got a standard long-comb NEW that's stamped with the older Goodwill patent numbers -- the ones that Gaisman held (US1633739 and US1639335) rather than the later Gillette ones (US1815745 and US1858316) -- along with the same "OTHER PATS. PEND." message that the Goodwills carry, and it came to me, at least, with a common bar handle on it.
 
That said, in looking through some of my Goodwills and NEWs here this afternoon I noticed something that I hadn't caught before. I've got a standard long-comb NEW that's stamped with the older Goodwill patent numbers -- the ones that Gaisman held (US1633739 and US1639335) rather than the later Gillette ones (US1815745 and US1858316) -- along with the same "OTHER PATS. PEND." message that the Goodwills carry, and it came to me, at least, with a common bar handle on it.

Very interesting, Porter. Always learning.

Thanks for your expert input.
 
I don't believe the bar handles were around quite that early either, and, while I've seen plenty of Goodwill heads matched up with bar handles, I've not seen any that were reliably original enough for me to be comfortable saying that they definitely came that way. However, this was an extremely turbulent time for Gillette as a company not to mention the economy as a whole, and with all the other mixing and matching they seemed to have done during this time it would be hard to definitively rule anything out.

That said, in looking through some of my Goodwills and NEWs here this afternoon I noticed something that I hadn't caught before. I've got a standard long-comb NEW that's stamped with the older Goodwill patent numbers -- the ones that Gaisman held (US1633739 and US1639335) rather than the later Gillette ones (US1815745 and US1858316) -- along with the same "OTHER PATS. PEND." message that the Goodwills carry, and it came to me, at least, with a common bar handle on it.

So does that make it a Goodwill? Ran out of razors to put in the Goodwill boxes and used a few NEWs to fill orders and get them out the door?
 
So does that make it a Goodwill? Ran out of razors to put in the Goodwill boxes and used a few NEWs to fill orders and get them out the door?

Toby, the identity of a razor is defined by its head, not by the handle (well generally speaking). The only doubt was whether the handle originally came with that head or not. Apparently Porter also doesn't believe it did.

So, while the handle is not original, it is still a Goodwill #175. :laugh:

It looks like a NEW, because that's what it is ... in the end it's just a NEW with a different alignment system created to promote their New Gillette Blades.

There's also Old Type based Goodwill razors:

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So does that make it a Goodwill? Ran out of razors to put in the Goodwill boxes and used a few NEWs to fill orders and get them out the door?

That was actually referring to Porter's "standard long-comb NEW that's stamped with the older Goodwill patent numbers".






 
That was actually referring to Porter's "standard long-comb NEW that's stamped with the older Goodwill patent numbers".






Sorry, I misunderstood.

In that case, no it doesn't make it a Goodwill. It's a standard NEW with different patent numbers. An odd razor I'd like to find.
 
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