thinking about getting a straight razor. what more do i need for it?

"Mmmh, aren't golf balls wire wrapped? What would make someone cut the cover off of a golf ball :eek:? Ok, I don't ask :). The blade of a razor is so thin that I could easily see breakouts occuring in such a use without the steel having to be overly hard."
No, they are not wire wrapped. We were kids. Steel that is soft bends. Steel that is hard breaks.
Razors are easily sharpened because the blades are hollow ground VERY thin. No need to "rebevel" (reprofile). Razors in the old days were hardened to nearly "file hard."
Bill
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Ceramic has way too low an edge stability to make a good razor. Sandvik stainless razor blade steels are designed to be ran very hard. I'll see if I can't find out how they are hardened specifically in razor blades.

-Cliff
Click to expand...

hehe they are "ice tempered" whatever that means..

do you think RWL would be better than AEB-L for this application?
 
M Wadel said:
hehe they are "ice tempered" whatever that means.
Click to expand...

Usually refers to dry ice treatment after the quench to room temperature.

do you think RWL would be better than AEB-L for this application?
Click to expand...

No, it is much worse because the carbide size and volume is way too high. Interesting enough, the ingot version of 154CM actually has a slightly higher edge stability than then P/M version. On first inspection that seems odd but it has to do with the average carbide intersetion volume and the higher dispersion in the P/M actually raises this and thus reduces the edge stability. You are probably not going to see that promoted by the manufacturers though.

-Cliff
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Usually refers to dry ice treatment after the quench to room temperature.-Cliff
Click to expand...

yeah that was my guess too, just sounded a little weird


Cliff Stamp said:
No, it is much worse because the carbide size and volume is way too high. .
-Cliff
Click to expand...

i had a feeling it would be like that. it would be fun with a razor you dont have to strop/hone very often. so RWL came to mind since the moly and chrome-carbides are softer than Al-Oxide it would have been possible to sharpen it fairly good on most stones while providing a little more wear resistance. but i guess you cant "have it all"..
 
Generally a large volume of primary carbides are not going to help much in razor sharpness because by the time the edge fractures enough for them to be of use you would long have sharpened it anyway. To get more edge retention you would want to just increase the amout of carbon dissolved in the austensite so you could get an as-tempered hardness of 65/67 HRC. Plus at the same time you also have to prevent excessive carbide formation.

-Cliff
 
what stainless steel would make a good razor? except the obvious 12c27 and 13c26/AEB-L i mean. i was thinking of an atleast usable steel with better edge retention then the usual stuff found in massproduced razors. small grained yet wear resistant (probably kinda tricky to pull that off or?)
 
There are a host of similar alloys, AUS-6A and 420HC for example. The problem is that this class of steel usually gets a really low end hardening so people have a horrible impression of them.

-Cliff
 
Bill DeShivs said:
"Mmmh, aren't golf balls wire wrapped? What would make someone cut the cover off of a golf ball :eek:? Bill
Click to expand...

Actually, balls were never wire wrapped. The old 3 piece balls were wrapped in rubber bands. Most golf balls today are a 1 or 2 piece rubber ball with a synthetic cover.
 
M Wadel said:
oh yeah now its on its way :D dovo stainless w polished stainless handle. i also ordered a spyderco UF stone even tho its not the best for this application, but i hope it will do, it was convenient to buy both from the same place (they didnt have nortons).

anyway tomorrow i will go leatherhunting in the stores downtown (for a couple of diy strops). exactly what kind of leather am i looking for? from what animal, and which part?
Click to expand...

The best were made from horsehide. Check out ebay. I got a very nice horsehide/canvas strop for ~$35 IIRC. It was a few years ago.

Rob
 
havent gotten the razor yet but its on its way. just found out the razors arent "shave ready" when you get them :confused:
so now what, should i strop the razor or hone it then strop, how dull are razors when delivered?? how much honing can i expect to put in before its ready really? a few strokes or alot of strokes? anybody know?
 
Dovo seems to be pretty good about this. They don't need much work on the strop. Only your face can tell, when the razor is ready. It's not that the razor is blunt when it comes, but you want to smooth out the edge and polish it on the strop a bit more before your first shave. Normally, I do 20 strokes on the canvas + 30 strokes on the leather before each shave. Before your first shave, I would take on the order of 100-200 strokes. Shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes. Don't rush it, be deliberate and make sure you turn the razor over the spine. You can easily cut the strop in half in one wrong move and you can damage the edge just as easily.

Bill: I have not been able to find a source that lists razor hardness, but I asked around quite a bit, and didn't really find much takers to the question, but the ones that answered have agreed with you, that it should be hard. So at least for the moment I stand corrected: Razors are not soft. The reason why they can develop dents in the edge like I saw must be because of the extremely thin cross section.
 
yeah and another thing, grainsize. what grainsize (the ferritgrains µM) does (astm or intercept) AEB-L have?

ive read, 15 intercept and up means very very finegrained steel. (that would be 11 astm i suppose.)

which family(s) of steel have the finest grains and smallest carbides?

hss is supposedly very finegrained but how finegrained? and they cram lots of carbides in hss.

how finegrained does it have to be to make a good razorsteel? and what size of the carbides?

im looking for the ultimate, and the hunt goes on... :D i just love steel
 
The ATSM grain size numbers are calculated as :

# grains/in^2 (100X mag) = 2^(n-1)

where n is the grain size number which ranges from 1 to 10. There is also the Shepard fracture test which compares fracture surfaces to known samples which according to Allen have an equilavent scale.

Coarse steels like D2 have a grain size of 7.5 which equals about 90 grains per square inch at 100X mag so the grains are about 25 microns in dimension. The fine grained steels are 9 to 10, which include W1 (9), M2 (9.5) and F2 (10) and here you are looking at grains of about 10 microns.

The carbides in these fine grained steels are much smaller as they form both inside the grains and on the grain boundres. For the W series steels the carbides are typically of the order of a micron and they are several microns for M2. You have to be careful here though because the average carbide size is largely meaningless because you can't average over significantly different volumes in that manner. You also need to look at the amount of segregation. S60V for example has a small average carbide size but because there is so much carbide they often intersect and form aggregates which are much larger than the individual carbides.

Grain size is of course highly sensitive to heat treatment, Cashen and others have described in great detail how to reduce the grain size of steels with proper normalizing. I am still looking for grain size data on some of the modern cutlery stainless steels.

-Cliff
 
GarageBoy said:
Ok, how well does a double edged safety razor compare?
Click to expand...


i have now shaved with my razor. but it didnt get it sharp enough, so the shave was only soso.. it was very hard to get a good shave the first time i used it, but i guess it comes with time. my number one priority now is getting the razor as sharp as it should be, for my next shave. i accidentally cut myself, it didnt even hurt but you really have to stay focused on what youre doing when shaving with a straight (at least i have) because even when theyre not sharp enough they are still very very sharp...:eek: so i would say my mach 3 did a better job sofar.


and now something else. can Talonite be used for a razor? is it finegrained enough? ive read it rather bends than chips (iirc). can talonite be honed on a spyderco hone? there are no fine diamond hones (6k+) that i can afford, 200bux+ for those or so, so if i cant sharpen it on a spyderco UF/norton 8k its out of the question for me.
 
Talonite is really coarse carbided, similar to 440C. It is also very soft and weak and thus has horrible edge stability. It can be sharpened however on pretty much any stone.

-Cliff
 
M Wadel said:
i found this site if someone is interested http://www.en.nassrasur.com/razorcentral/

i also found out that the ultrafine spyderco stones are probably too rough for a razor. too bad cos now it will be expensive
Click to expand...

I shave with straight razors on the weekends, don't have time during the week. I use Spyderco UF stone, it works just fine. It feels significantly finer than my Norton 8K, so I use it. Others have better success with the Norton. Whatever works for you.

Check out the Razor forums. There are some pretty good posts about honing, stropping, and beard prep. Good luck, and enjoy!
 
hey sodak. i got a UF stone too. if you clean the stone and dry it, then clean your hands and very gentle pull your fingertips over the surface you can feel some particles sticking up. about 50-100 or so on each side. i shaved these off with a SM fine triangle rod (the flat side where the fish-hook groove is) and now my stone is much smoother. i dont know if theyre all like that but it could be worth looking into. i also rounded off the sharp corners with a medium rod. i feel the stone wound better for razors now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top