Some Inside Baseball Upon a Little-Known, Very Special Razor 'Technology'

[Jarrod]

I know the C135 is known to be very hard: would TI not be able to make the same claim of all their razors once a good edge is on it that it's good for years of use with only pastes to maintain? .

They did to me directly/repeatedly, at least the Keyser Soze dude did, not that I buy it. But I know for sure on this one that I have if I hone it it will 'revert' to normalcy, so I don't wish to do that.

The bold claim that the edge is good for years: I'm puzzled to what about this more acute angle would allow it to hold an edge longer/better than a traditional angled edge with razor of the same steel.

Nothing at all-it is assuredly more fragile just as an axe's obtuse edge is assuredly more durable. But with skilled use - namely as slimy a lather as I can manage and as low an angle of blade to skin as any straight I've used - it does seem that touching it up on their wooden thing's kept mine indistinguishable from new now about 5-6 yrs on among ~8-15 regular users being chosen at random for a ~200/yr straight razor user of average beard. Can't possibly be true, but I also can't recall a single nick from this one blade.

Slash; trust someone with insider's perspective or not as you see fit, but it is my position that the fact that they gave up doing this has nothing to do with them being a better shaver or not. TI still makes beautiful things, but forgetting this experimental phase, by and large what I note of them now is they're not nearly as thin as they once were, and that's something to which I obsess. To me now they're just lovely standard full hollow grinds, full of French style but the days of them being the king of sing are, for me, closed for now.

If it was so easy just to grind down the various razors' spines and produce the narrow angles that are not harsh (which this razor certainly is not), I suspect they'd all be doing it, no? They could tout the razor with "extra super hollow" or whatever and charge more. It came from a Sheffield text, must be some reason the old masters of the late Victorian Era found it worth writing down. I don't know the metallurgical advantages to these particular Thiers but I know we used to sell a whole lot of these things and they were the high watershed as claimed to us...it might have been the creator's pride talking first and foremost.

 

[dundak]

Nice story and would love to own one of those TI's. In my own experience a give credence to the effectiveness of such a grind. I maintain all my razors on pasted linen strops with TI white paste and Dove red/black. I think that medium reduces the shoulder of the bevel and thins the edge that results in a a very keen comfortable razor