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Razor making how-to


SnailForge

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This is going to be an article on how to make a razor. There are many ways to go about this. Some people will do it differently. Some makers whose work I respect a lot work differently. This is just how I work, and it works for me.

At a high level, it goes something like this: I start with stock, and forge a razor blank to shape. I anneal it, grind / file it to shape, and do heat treatment. Then comes the finish grinding, polishing, and making scales. At that point it is ready for honing and test shaving.

During the process, I don’t use center lines, I don’t measure angles, and with a couple of specific exceptions, I don’t measure anything. It’s all eyeballing and ‘that looks about right’ engineering. In this article, I will work on the assumption that if you want to follow it, you already know basic forging, metal working and heat treatment.

I will post this article as separate posts in this thread, so that I can write pieces as the razor in this article progresses.

Steel

I will use Damascus for this project. It should go without saying that you should work with materials that are suitable, and that you are confident in working. A razor can be a tricky thing to make correctly in terms of geometry. Before you move on to expensive materials, you will want to be confident in your skills, know how to recover from mistakes, and have enough experience to recognize the first signs that things are about to go pear shaped so that you can correct in time.

A good steel for razors should have enough carbon (0.7% or up), have a fine grain, and be free from many of the alloys used in knife steels. The only requirements for a razor steel are that it can take a fine edge and be honed by a human. A razors edge is not subject to shearing forces or impact. It does not need to be wear resistant. That means that 52100, M42, Hitachi blue steel, while excellent knife steels are not good choices for a razor.

They are extremely difficult to work, especially the post heat treatment grinding and polishing. They fight you every step of the way. When get to the honing stage, it will be a dog to hone because it is so wear resistant it is like whittling down your stones. And in the end, the edge will probably not be as fine as if you chose plain carbon steel.

Then there is oil vs water. A hollow ground razor can easily crack or warp during water quenching if the hollows on both sides are not identical. And even then, it may crack if it hardens differentially. And because of the thickness of the spine, that can happen. With oil that is usually far less an issue.

When it comes to regular steel, my preference is O2. It is in my opinion the best steel for a razor. It has .95% carbon, Manganese which makes it harden nicely, and nothing much else. It also produces edges that are fine, strong, smooth, and yet pretty easy to hone. It is not available in the US anymore, so we usually tell beginners to use O1 instead because it is a pretty good general purpose steel. The Tungsten makes it fight a bit harder than is ideal, but the heat treatment is straight forward, and quenching is safe.

In this case the Damascus I use is an O2/L6 mix which is made for me by Howard Clark. Howard makes it for me without precision grinding it. It would be pointless for him to precision grind it only for me to throw it in the fire and hit it with a hammer. It might look like precision ground stock in the pic, but that is only because he is just that good with a power hammer.

01_steel_rough.jpg.d3e7f3db81ccc68e8f060

The first thing I do is grind the sides clean to double check there are no welding issues, and to grind away any evidence of the last fold. It’s been my experience that if you get rid of the lines that show the last time it was folded, the odds of it splitting when I hammer it are drastically reduced.

5647c16a7b72e_02_steelclean.jpg.79e4b4fb

 

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Thanks for doing this. I have been contemplating a straight for awhile now, and you have already changed my plans some, haha!  

I have some 52100 that I was thinking would be a good choice since it is 1% carbon. Though my employer's suppliers I can get the usual O-1,W-1,A-2,D-2 etc..

 

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52100 is wonderful stuff. Just not for razors. A2 and D2 are not used for razors. O1 and W1 are. Of the 2 I would go for O1 because It won't warp whereas W1 is a bit trickier and it can be discouraging to have your first razors go PING. A guy I know destroyed half the things he made in 1095.

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Now it is time to forge out the general shape of the razor. I use a primitive setup to heat the steel. I like working with charcoal because it burns clean, doesn’t smell, and doesn’t have the potential to make the shop go boom..

03_in the fire.jpg

First I mark the transition between the edge and the tang using the side of the anvil. Then I upset the tang area a bit to get it out of the way of the edge part.  Then I do the same at the other end of the edge part, using my horn to pinch it just a bit. This makes it fairly easy to bevel the edge part into a triangle without messing up the tang. Once the edge part has been shaped, I further upset and draw out the tang into a taper.

04_forging temperature.jpg

05_hot.jpg

The reason I do it in this manner is that I have found this to be the easiest method of making the blank while ensuring that the tang and the edge are aligned properly lengthwise while also keeping them aligned in the vertical plane. With this I mean that if you look head-on at the blank, you see the triangular section positioned vertically, with the crosscut of the tang behind it, also with a rectangular cross section oriented vertically.

I have found this to be the trickiest part of the process because where they meet, the steel develops ‘shoulders’. If you hammer the triangle once while the shoulders are on the anvil, the tang twists and realigning it is a bother. Additionally, the tang has to taper evenly from the shoulders to the end of the tail. I cut the blade from the stock using a cut-off hardy. With some steels I use an angle grinder. For example the Japanese suminagashi steel (white paper steel core with soft sides) has delaminated twice on me when using a cut-off hardy. Granted, that could be resolved by cutting hotter, but that creates the problem that the spine might bend sideways because it isn’t very strong when hot on account of the mild steel sides.

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And now of course I cannot edit the previous comment anymore after it first disappeared in its entirety, and then went through with just the pics and the above comment, and then 2 failed attempts to insert the text only to be told I can not edit anymore..

I'm sorry guys. I give up.

This is just not working and my post in the feedback forum has gotten exactly zero suggestions on how to make it work. If the software ever gets fixed I will finish this series, but there is no way I am going to make 10 or so more posts in this manner, with half an hour or more of frustrated attempts at getting a simple post through this software that is buggier than Windows Vista beta 1

If anyone wants to know something specific please send me a PM. I do get email notifications and I will get back to you.

 

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Today I finished HT and I took pics along every step of the way. I am finishing up the first part of the article (everything up to right after the HT). As soon as that is ready I will post it, and post  here. That should be sometime this weekend. I am at 2300 words already, I suspect that after HT, I will be around 4000 words. And that is roughly half of what the total will be.

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The first part is up, and so far includes everything up to and including Heat Treatment.

I posted it in the forge section at straightrazorplace because that is where many razor makers hang out, and it would allow people to ask questions, whereas my site is static.

why not post the information here rather than using our bandwidth to send people to your site? If you wish to advertise here please PM Foo for advertising rates.

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I posted a link here, in my previous post.

If you look at it, only the first 'w' of www is still there. Either the software ate my link and left the 'w' (which I doubt because the post came through fine yesterday) or one of the mods objected to me posting the link and edited it out without sending me a message or posting a clarification. I would hope that if someone edited out my link, they would send me a message.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Hmmm, I see it plain as day now that I registered. Do some of the threads, or subforums not show if you are not registered?

The new software may have eaten the link. I know I have had trouble posting pictures for quite awhile now...

I have always gotten a message from the admins, and mods if they edited a post of mine.

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Snailforge ,

                  the link was removed as in part of the Terms & Conditions / Rules of IFI direct hot linking people to another site is not to be done .

As it was explained to me it is like walking into a bar & telling everyone that there is a way cooler bar over the road .

Sorry you didn't get a message about this , but life got in the way & I had other more important things to do .

 

Dale Russell

IFI " Minion " / Demi Admin / Moderator86

 

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Nope. I cannot post a link. Apparently i cannot even just say in words where it is on the other place, and posting here is plain impossible because this software is broken beyond repair.

Instead of worrying that people might find their way over to the other place,  the owners could think about why i stopped posting the article here.

I want to share this knowledge and preferably right here but that is impossible. So i guess that means noone here will see it. To continue the bar analogy: how do you expect people to stay if you don't have chairs or beer?

Was all this misery really worth the couple hundred dollars in savings? 

Of course you same to be posting this here, and now...

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Snailforge

                 there was a " quick fix " posted on how you can post , but I guess with all your self importance you couldn't be bothered to read it .

Don't get me wrong Glenn / Andrew & the rest of the team ( myself included ) understand the frustration of how the site is working .

13 hours ago, SnailForge said:

 

Was all this misery really worth the couple hundred dollars in savings? 

Glenn Conner puts his hand into his own pocket to pay for the site , there is little income from tailgate section , sale of t-shirts/tools , even smaller amount from the advertising & lastly from those who donate $ to IFI . I myself donate hundreds ( if not thousands ) of hrs to the site a yrs to help keep it running so people like you can post in it

Why not put your money where you mouth is & donate to the site to help get it back to the number 1 Blacksmithing site in the world instead of whining about how you cant post on a " FREE TO USE " website

 

Dale Russell

IFI " Minion " / Demi Admin / Moderator86

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I will l put my hat in the ring also and state..... Knock off the cry baby crap. 

I dont see any donation from you snail forge, or your friends but I do see a lot of demands on how we need to bow down and kiss your hiney to make this site better for you to use, and get more people to your web site, so I will state this clearly, this is not a web fight or trying to save hundreds, its Glenn Conner house so his rules. How may times can you go into your local bar and send people to another bar before you get booted?  Guess what you are about to find out. 

Snailforge was given a chance to post his URL here and he refused our offer, so stop blaming us, If you want to place blame about being cheap blame Snailforge, it works both ways, he could have listed his URL.  Also remember Glenn pays the bills here and a few of us have been asked to help enforce the rules, One of them is  "Thou shalt not haslte"  (members or staff)  and this is the end of it NOW. If I hear more I will stop it permanently, Act your age.  We all are working at getting this fixed, it bugging us also, It is a lease on the software and not everything can be accessed by us, it is not our choice.   We dont send people off site when the information can be posted here for easy access.

I like your series about the straight razor but  we can not do anything about these posting issues and are waiting on IP systems, OR a large donation of money to get new software.   If you would bother to read the forum feedback section you would know there have been issues. and I would not be so upset with you forcing me to interrupt my thanksgiving day to deal with this.

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Steve, I was wondering what the reason was to get away from the original forum service we had? It seems that VBulletin is pretty popular with a few forums I am on, and it works. If I remember right that is what IFI was using when I first signed up. My frustration stems from the fact it was cruising along great, now I have lots of problems with posts getting lost, and I cannot post any pictures which I could do before. I am checking to see what is different on my end, since I can post pics from the libraries computer. I wouldn't mind donating if I knew the upgrades were going to work,or we could get back onto the old system. Hope it all gets straightened out since it is still the best blacksmithing site out there, even with the problems.

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