Sheffield Safety Razors

[mjclark]

We all know about the superlative Sheffield straight razors but before WW2 there was a thriving safety razor industry there too.

I acquired a Kleen safety razor from the 1930's and this sparked my interest:
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/500795-Kleen-Shaving-Vintage-Sheffield-DE

So I contacted Swann-Morton the ancestors of the company which produced that razor.
One of their Directors, Michael McGinley took the trouble to phone me and he was keen to discuss the Sheffield razor industry.
Later he sent me a lot of literature from the archives as well as some NOS blades and a couple of NOS DE razors.
Amazing!

Wouldn't it be great to shave with some of the Sheffield safety razors using the original NOS blades?
And these manufacturers have such interesting stories too.
Swann-Morton was founded by a metallurgist and a secretary who came from the Wardonia works (and now their the premier scalpel manufacturer and reintroduced the Kleen brand).
Laurel and Darwin's have fascinating and moving stories, and there's so much to say about the others too.

So I thought it would be great to shave through these Sheffield safeties with the original blades and have some discussion about the amazing (and normally quite aggressive!) razors too.

The only question now is where to start?

 

[pwilber92]

😮👍

 

[BSAGuy]

Very cool info. Good luck on your Sheffield DE journey.

 

[poppi]

That's wonderful. And now you have pieces of history too

 

[BigJ]

Thanks for the history and terrific photos!

 

[Rusty Shaver]

Those are magnificent! Would be entirely incorrect to say that I am not jealous.. I seriously am! Wow! It's amazing when you find such kind and generous benefactors willing to go out of their way to help and surprise you.

As far as I know, the Dawn is a three piece copy of the Red Ring with a Zamac head and bakelite handle. Should have a very similar feel when shaving. The Darwin blades are the real test here as the rest of the blades are either carbon steel or stainless. Give one of them a go first.

 

[mjclark]

Those are magnificent! Would be entirely incorrect to say that I am not jealous.. I seriously am! Wow! It's amazing when you find such kind and generous benefactors willing to go out of their way to help and surprise you.

As far as I know, the Dawn is a three piece copy of the Red Ring with a Zamac head and bakelite handle. Should have a very similar feel when shaving. The Darwin blades are the real test here as the rest of the blades are either carbon steel or stainless. Give one of them a go first.

Thanks man! The Dawn is really what started this - it only takes proprietary blades since the pins, which as you point out are like the Red Ring, are very close together even closer than the Wardonias.
Thanks to someone I know who has a large repository of vintage blades I acquired a Dawn blade - she also had the Eclipse and Darwin blades.

Do you have any more info on the Dawn?

 

[mjclark]

And here's the Dawn between the Eclipse and the Knockout:

 

[Rusty Shaver]

Unfortunately not more than is available online, however, the pictures I've seen all seem to have parts of the bar or combs missing as seen with yours. The metal under the plating is also grey so that leads me to believe the head is probably cast out of Zamak. Might have been a cheap fix when the Eclipse factory was destroyed in World War 2.

Didn't know about the proprietary blades use.



Also love to use both the Red Ring and the Knockout razors. The head designs are exceptional and if you know how to use them, deliver excellent shaves time and again.

 

[mjclark]

Thanks again [MENTION=103201]Rusty Shaver[/MENTION].
I hadn't noticed how similar the Dawn profile is to the Eclipse until you pointed it out.

My first experience with an Eclipse Red Ring I was impressed with how smooth it was but wondered what the hype was about.
My second experience I cranked up the aggression by turning the handle as far as you can go before the head starts wiggling and wow! Easily as aggressive as a Futur on 6 and definitely up there in R41 territory but with an unbelievable smoothness.
What a razor.

After this I'm really interested to see how the Dawn shaves.

 

[mjclark]

So shaving with the Dawn and the OEM blade this morning:

Although it probably seemed like a good idea at the time the fact that the Dawn won't take Gillette blades is now rather irritating.
But it was a whole lot of fun tracking down a NOS proprietary Dawn blade.
And guess what? 80 years after it's manufacture that blade is good to go!

I really like the feel of carbon steel blades and seem to get much less irritation from them, but the do feel tuggy on the first couple of passes, leading some people to discard them thinking that they are corroded.
But by the third pass they "settle in" for a great smooth shave.
And that was the case here.

And of course there's the problem of storage - they need to be dried and stored between shaves to preserve them.
Some people use oil or alcohol. I just wiped the blade dry and put it back in the waxed paper.

And the Dawn does feel like an Eclipse Red Ring but without the finesse or balance.
Like a lot of the British DEs from the 1930's it's satisfyingly aggressive and I got a great shave.

 

[Rusty Shaver]

Excellent! Disappointing about the alignment pins but you win some and lose some..

Glad the razor and blade shaved well. As for the blade, it's moisture that is your enemy.. try to keep a couple silicon gel packs around and the blade should survive without rust accumulation.

 

[mjclark]

Excellent! Disappointing about the alignment pins but you win some and lose some..

Glad the razor and blade shaved well. As for the blade, it's moisture that is your enemy.. try to keep a couple silicon gel packs around and the blade should survive without rust accumulation.

Thanks - the gel packs are a great idea.

 

[mjclark]

So I broke out the Darwin blade and put it in my rarest razor, the Wardonia Single Ring:

Comparing notes with Nigel Sharpe (the world's #1Wardonia expert) there may only be 8 of these Single Ring Wardonia style razors in existence - one in Italy, this one here in Devon and Nigel has the other 6 although 2 of them aren't assembled.
Looks like these were prototypes that never made mass production.
Wow, what a razor!

But the geometry is the same as the other plastic baseplate Wardonias and has a lot in common with a slant.
There's a lot of blade curvature to add rigidity to the blade, and the serrations in the guard bend the hairs so that it's sliced (a slant achieves the same effect by moving the blade rather than the hairs) and that massive blade gap which allows for a lot of effective angles.

Wardonias are some of the best known as most ubiquitous Sheffield safety razors.
The later plastic handled models used proprietary blades (more of this later) but up to 1929 the metal handled models used the Gillette style standard blades.

There's an in depth thread on Wardonias here:

http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/456809-Wardonia-Revelation

And the Darwin blade was well preserved in the original factory grease.
On the first pass it was so tuggy that I wondered if it was no good but it quickly settled in to a beautiful shave and by the third pass it felt like one of those vintage British Wilkinson blades.
Gorgeous, and also surprisingly sharp.
So Darwin's claimed that these blades are rustless. Let's find out!

 

[alex2363]

Thanks man! The Dawn is really what started this - it only takes proprietary blades since the pins, which as you point out are like the Red Ring, are very close together even closer than the Wardonias.
Thanks to someone I know who has a large repository of vintage blades I acquired a Dawn blade - she also had the Eclipse and Darwin blades.

Do you have any more info on the Dawn?

It wasn't popularly massed produced model, so there's limited info.


Waits compendium

 

[mjclark]

It wasn't popularly massed produced model, so there's limited info.


Waits compendium

View attachment 701972

Thanks Alex! And you're right, there's very little info anywhere on the Dawn.

The proprietary blade issue occurs again and again with these razors and I guess has contributed to them falling into obscurity.

The Wardonia , Knockout, Laurel and Ocean blades are all interchangeable but none of them will fit the Dawn.
I've also been jumping through hoops getting some Laurel Dumb-Bell blades - more of that later too!

 

[mjclark]

The Darwin blade experiment came to an abrupt end on the second shave - in spite of drying it carefully and storing it safely it was unusably rough.
I seriously think that the Darwin Cobalt Steel may have problems with age deterioration.
I'd put it in a Wardonia 1929 which has a metal handle and takes standard Gillette blades:

 

[mjclark]

Switched to the Knockout:

This must be one of the most collectible razors of all time with all that great packaging.

And there's an excellent thread about the Knockout here:

http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/157951-Got-a-Knockout!

The Knockout comes from FC Cartledge who wasn't primarily a razor manufacturer but more of a general entrepreneur famous for a series of boxing related trading cards.

There's a couple of other Sheffield razors, the Fuluse and the Nelson, which are identical to the Knockout but in different colours so it looks like Cartledge rebranded these in white and did the most amazing job of packaging which is covered in pithy slogans.

And it is a thoroughly excellent shaver, aggressive and smooth like most British DEs from the 1920's and 1930's.
This was a ginseng age of razor design, DEs, SEs and straights.

The OEM Knockout blade was predictably tuggy on the first pass then settled in.
What a beautiful and very collectible razor

 

[mjclark]

So the Eclipse Red Ring this morning with OEM Eclipse blade:

You can still buy Eclipse hacksaw blades (as in the first photo) which are excellent.

James Neill travelled to the United States to promote the hacksaw blades and whilst there struck up the manufacturing deal that would create the Neillite bakelite razor.

But he is even more famous for the Eclipse Red Ring.
These are very collectible and really quite amazing shavers. They are phenomenally smooth and adjustable by rotating the bottom of the handle in the same way as the Gillette Single Ring.
And there's a magnet in the end of the handle to pick up razor blades!

Mine has lost most of the red colouring from the Red Ring but you get the idea:

Obviously if you loosen the handle too much the head becomes loose, but loosened by four notches the Eclipse RR shaves very like my Spitfire R41 but significantly smoother.

These amazing shaving qualities coupled with the beautiful tooth comb design of the head and the awesome Art Deco representation of a solar eclipse on the top cap (the sun and the moon are square!!!!) this has to be one of the finest DE razors in existence.

I was surprised to find that the Eclipse blades were the newer thin style and, although sealed, had some spots of corrosion.
And guess what? The blade was tuggy on the first pass but settled in to a very smooth shave very quickly.

Off to work now feeling like a million dollars!

 

[alex2363]

I have few pics for ya...