Safety bar vs comb teeth

[red71veloce]

Hello all, as you can see I am new to the forum. Although I have shaved with a mug and brush for more years than I care to admit, I never used a DE until a couple of weeks ago. My son who may be even more of a tightwad than me decided to start up with a Merkur of some style and let me try it. Got a great shave right out of the box! I decided to purchase a '66 SS off the bay and promptly butchered my face with the same ST 300 blades that worked well in his. After a change to Derbys, things are much better. Seems different blades work in certain razors.

I am curious about the difference between a razor like the '66 SS I have with a safety bar, and a razor with the bar-less teeth? Is one more comfortable, forgiving, etc? Just wondering.

I am on a few different forums for varied subjects, and I have to say this one is just outstanding!

Tracy

 

[mdunn]

theres a couple of theories about the open comb (the one with teeth), the most common one is that it helps when youre shaving more than a day or so's growth.

The combs 'comb' your beard and ride on the skin, thus having the blade where it should be. A bar would ride on top of the beard, having the blade higher than where it should be

 

[Jatte]

i love the closed comb on my gem consistently awesome shaves ,

 

[red71veloce]

Interesting, and seems logical. So I assume that this would have no bearing on agressiveness, that being the distance of the blade gap on the head. I was thinking about trying a custom handled razor from some link I saw here, I think it was Bob's razors.....or something like that. I seemed most of his creations used an open combed head....maybe a Gillette Tech?? If I correctly recall, these were refinished heads.

 

[mdunn]

the comb has no effect on the agressiveness, no.

HOWEVER, lots of the open combs heads were made back when the DE blades were thicker, so with new thinner blades they are slightly more agressive than they were made to be. Still great shavers, and not overly agressive though

 

[red71veloce]

Thanks for the replys. I may do a bit more research before puchasing again.......but I can see this is going to be a new obsession! Good god.....not just a razor obsession, but brushes....soaps.....aftershaves.....crap, I may have to retire just to find the time for this hobby!

p.s. Just contributed....happily I might add!

 

[Bertilak]

The following is mostly a cut-n-paste from an earlier post of mine answering the same question.

Open comb was the original Gillette safety razor design. The idea is that the teeth (called "guard teetrh"), in combination with the razor's cap, protected the skin from being cut by the blade. The blade still "stuck out" past a tangent between the cap and the guard teeth but that exposure was limited for safety. Whiskers longer than the exposed distance could reach the blade by passing between the teeth.

That was the standard design for decades. I wasn't there years ago when open combs were generally replaced by safety bars but have heard some plausible explanations:

1. When an open comb DE was dropped, the outer teeth would bend. One improvement they made was to beef up the outer teeth and you will see some razors with fatter teeth at the corners but this didn't eliminate the problem completely. Safety bars don't have teeth to bend.
2. Open comb DE razors were generally made from cast metal. This worked well but was expensive. Safety bars can be made with stamped sheet metal and are therefore cheaper to manufacture.
3. Although the above two issues made safety bars desirable there was a problem -- men tended to go for extended periods without shaving and safety bars just flattened out the long whiskers making the shave less effective. Once men started shaving more often this became less of an issue so the above considerations started to win out.

Note that American Safety Razor (ASR, sold as GEM and Ever Ready brand SEs) had an apparently unique solution with its head design which used both teeth and a bar. The teeth were the safety feature (as above) and the bar was there to keep the teeth in line. The design lifted the bar up off of the face making it less of an interference when shaving longer whiskers. The design also allowed for a stamped sheet metal manufacturing process. Perhaps this was one of ASR's 1900/1901 patents.

Another advantage of open comb (and the ASR equivalent) is that the lather is not scraped off the beard just a millimeter or so before the blade gets to it. Apparently this was not enough of a consideration to prevent Gillette from going to safety bars. Many safety bars are grooved, fluted, or otherwise shaped to reduce this scraping effect.

About aggressiveness: The term is not well defined, but however you define it, the difference between teeth and a safety bar has no effect on it. Both the toothed and the barred safety razor designs provide the same type of safety -- keeping the blade from digging into the skin by limiting the blade's exposure to the skin. Both styles are equally effective. According to a Wikipedia article, the original safety razor's design (late 18th century) was inspired by the wood plane, designed to control and limit the exposure of the blade. Both open comb and safety bar razors use this same technique. There are examples of both very aggressive and very mild razors in both open comb and safety bar configurations.

 

[red71veloce]

Wow, thank you Mr. Paulsen! Very informative post. I never considered the scraping of the soap issue. I am intrigued with trying an open comb head. At risk of getting scorched with the "use the search" post, anyone have a few quick non-aggressive open-comb models?

Tracy

 

[Shaman]

One unanticipated benefit to the open comb design, for me at least, is that if my angle is too shallow for the blade to reach the beard then it leaves comb marks in the lather where-as a closed comb gleefully removes the lather regardless and it's not till I feel my face that I know I didn't cut any hair.

 

[dpmtherrien]

I find that the open comb will give me a better shave if I have a 3 or more days growth of beard. For everyday or less than 3 days growth I'll use my straight bar. For longer hair the open comb does give a closer shave with less irritation.