I love silverware. There, I said it. I love the colour, the history behind pieces of wrought silver, and the limitlessness of the vast array of items which can be made out of silver. One thing I’ve always wanted is a pair of silver chopsticks!
After hunting and digging around on eBay for literally months, and using every combination of words that I could possibly conjure, I finally settled on a pair of silver chopsticks which were affordable, in great condition, which were marked, and which would be easy to use, and maintain.
The chopsticks I bought are Japanese in style, and they showed up in a nice, wooden presentation box, where they can be stored when they’re not on active duty as waistline-enhancement devices. All in all, a pretty nifty package.
The History of Silver Chopsticks
Silver chopsticks have existed for centuries, throughout Asia – mainly in the three major chopstick-using countries – China, Korea, and Japan. Just like silver cutlery in Western countries, the purpose of silver chopsticks was much the same – they were a status-symbol, a store of wealth, and a source of familial pride.
The tale is often told that silver chopsticks were favoured by the great emperors of China and Japan in ancient times, because eating with silver chopsticks would tell the emperor if his food had been poisoned. Supposedly, the poison would turn the silver black! – and this would be a sure sign that the food was tainted, and deadly!
Right?
No.
Actually, loads of things turn silver black – eggs, meat, spicy foods…basically anything which might have high levels of sulfur in it. It doesn’t mean that the food is poisonous – it just means that the silver has been tarnished by a chemical reaction – not that anybody in Ancient China would’ve understood what that was. It’s the sulfur dioxide, and the acids, in various foods (for example, lemon juice, salt, etc) which causes silver to turn black and discolour. Poison has nothing to do with it.
I want my own Set of Silver Chopsticks! Where do I get them?
Antique silver chopsticks can be found, if you’re patient enough, but you can also buy modern sliver chopsticks! Yes, silver chopsticks are still made today (try eBay, if you want to find a set), but beware of fakes!
As a general rule – never buy silverware (chopsticks, or otherwise) which is not hallmarked! Especially from online sources, like eBay. One of the main reasons for collecting silverware, now, as it was in centuries past – was to act as a store of wealth. That wealth doesn’t exist if the silver isn’t real! And in most cases, your word that the silver is real, isn’t going to convince most people – so why should you take the word of somebody else, that the silver they’re trying to sell you, is real, if they can’t independently prove it, by showing the hallmarks? Always remember this when buying silverware, especially from some Asian countries, where hallmarking is less stringent than it is in say, North America, and in Europe.
After all – that is the whole point of hallmarks – proving that silver is real. Believe it or not, but hallmarks on gold and silver are the oldest surviving form of customer-protection IN THE WORLD – and date back literally 1,000+ years, all the way to the Byzantine Empire of the 5th century!
“SILVER 925”, or 92.5% silver by purity. AKA – Sterling Silver.
I bought these chopsticks because they were clearly marked “SILVER 925” on the shafts. Without that – I wouldn’t have bothered. There are loads of sellers out there with “silver” chopsticks assuring you that they are silver, but until you get them tested, you only have their word for it. And sorry, but a person’s word isn’t enough to convince me to blow money on something silver, if it isn’t marked – and it shouldn’t be enough for you, either. And a lot of these chopsticks online and elsewhere, aren’t marked. Whatever you decide to buy – make sure they’re marked. If they don’t show you a photograph of the marks, or if you can’t find them – then move on and keep searching.
Japanese Personal Chopsticks!
One thing I loved about the chopsticks I bought is that they came from Japan. This interested me for a few reasons…
One, because Japan loves making things out of silver (seriously, have you seen Japanese silver sake sets?), but also, two, because Japan has a strong culture of personal dining utensils.
Unlike China, it’s really common in Japan for people to have their own personal, individual chopstick-sets, instead of just digging out a pair of mismatched whatevers, from the darkest depths the cutlery drawer in the kitchen, whenever it’s time to eat. You can even go to that Japanese super-store, DAISO, and you’ll see individual chopsticks-sets for sale – usually aimed at children – so that they can get used to the idea that “this is MY set, and only I am going to use them!” (by the way – those child’s sets are also really useful if you ever decide that you need a small set for traveling, or keeping them at the office for lunch, or whatever!) – they even come in their own little pouches and cases, enforcing the idea that these are your chopsticks, and none shall have use of them, apart from you!
The culture of personal chopsticks sets is so strong in Japan that there’s even stores there (bricks-and-mortar, or online) which sell a stunningly wide array of chopsticks in all kinds of styles and designs, from retractables, glass, porcelain, bamboo, bone, steel, exotic woods, screw-apart compact ones – and hell yeah – even ones in solid silver!
So – if you are looking for a nice pair of silver chopsticks – probably best to start in Japan, and widen your search from there.
Most people who know anything about pocketwatches and how they’re used or worn, will be familiar with the wide variety of attachments you can clip onto the bow (the ring at the top of a pocketwatch) for decorative, or security purposes.
Double-Alberts, Single-Alberts, ring-clip chains, belt-hook chains, grosgrain fobs, and drop-fobs are the most common types of pocketwatch adornments, but one type of pocketwatch accessory is almost forgotten in the 21st century – the pocketwatch chatelaine fob.
I’ve wanted a chatelaine fob for years, I just didn’t know it. Or rather…I did know it…I just didn’t know what they were called! I found out what their proper title was when I was browsing an antiques website a few years ago, and ever since, I’d been chasing after one, trawling eBay, trying to find one that I liked enough (and could afford!) to buy. Man, these things are expensive! I finally got lucky and found one which I could afford without breaking the bank, and made a dive for it.
What Is a Chatelaine?
When most people think of chatelaines, they think of those things that women used to wear back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras – large, elaborate clasps or brooches which hung from a woman’s belt or waistband, with chains hanging off the bottom, which were used to carry all kinds of little accessories: Scissors, keys, sewing equipment, pocketwatches, change-purses, pillboxes…the list of things you could clip to a chatelaine was almost endless. Chatelaines for women died out in the 1920s, when changing fashions and an increase in the use of handbags meant that was no longer fashionable (or necessary) to carry all your necessities on a set of chains hanging off your belt!
A man’s chatelaine is little different from a lady’s chatelaine, except that male ones aren’t quite as complicated! They’re comprised of a hook-clasp, which fastens to the user’s garments, a watch-chain, to hold the watch, and a metallic drop-fob, usually with a plaque or cartouche at the bottom for engraving the owner’s name or initials into.
The chatelaine fob which I ended up buying
The construction or style of the fob is completely open to interpretation. Some have braided wire, some have chains of different sizes and lengths, some have panels held together with rings or rivets…it’s really up to you, what you’re after, what you can find, and what your personal style is.
How do you Wear a Chatelaine Fob?
Since chatelaine fobs are so obscure these days, it’s probably not surprising that most people don’t know how to wear them.
The watch is clipped to the chain, and stored in the watch-pocket of your jeans, slacks or shorts. And yes, that “fifth pocket” on your jeans IS a WATCH-POCKET. It’s not for your keys, or coins, or condoms, or your cyanide pill if your mission goes pear-shaped…it is for your pocketwatch!
The clasp-hook is slid over your belt, or the waistband of your jeans, or shorts, and then clipped into place. The drop-fob just…drops down the side! It’s function is largely decorative. And there you have it! All done.
That’s neat! I wanna buy one!
Sure you do!…um…good luck finding one, but, sure!
Search eBay, using terms like “pocketwatch fob” or “chatelaine fob”, or “antique watch-fob” or word-combinations in that general direction, and you might find what you’re looking for. But be sure to pay really close attention to what you’re buying. In particular, make sure of the following:
Make sure that the drop-fob has the seal-fob at the bottom. Sometimes, they’re missing.
Make sure that the watch-chain is included. And make sure that if it is, the lobster-claw clasp at the end (that goes around the watch) is also included! Make sure that the hook-clasp (that goes around the watch) is also there.
How much do they cost, you ask? Well, it really depends. They run the whole gamut of prices, from under $100, to over $300! How much you wanna spend on the style you like is entirely up to you. But keep in mind that the vast, vast majority of chatelaine fobs are gold-filled. They’re not solid gold, hell they’re not even silver vermeil. They’ll be gilt brass in most instances. Think about that before you potentially drop hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a watch chatelaine.
Last year, I wrote an article on this blog about the time I discovered pair of sterling silver cufflinks with the Scotch College school crest on them. Discovered online, it was the biggest shock of my life that such a pair of cufflinks might even exist! I absolutely had to have them, and come hell-or-high-water, I added them to my collection.
This posting is all about the unlikely, and frankly – unexpected – sequel to the discovery of nine months previous.
Suffice to say that I was contacted by a retired antiques dealer up in Brisbane, who said that he’d stumbled across my blog while researching a discovery that he’d made in a pile of scrap gold and jewelry. His researches had led him to my blog, and after reading the first article I’d written about the sterling silver Scotch College cufflinks that I’d found, he was very eager to get in touch with me.
The cufflinks in gold (top) and sterling silver (bottom)
We made contact via text-message, and that was when he dropped the bombshell information on me that while digging around in some of his antique jewelry, he’d found a pair of the same cufflinks in 9ct solid gold!
I’ll admit it took me a couple of minutes to register this information. Silver cufflinks belonging to a high school are rare enough, but solid gold ones!? And antiques!? What the hell’s the chances of that?? He told me that he’d found my silver pair while researching the school motto, and asked me if I would like to buy the matching gold ones as well!
Uh, no. Thanks. It’s fine, no really…
OF COURSE I SAID YES!!
The back of the gold cufflinks, showing the maker’s mark and the hallmark for 9ct gold
After exchanging a couple of photographs and confirming what they were, and that they were real, we tossed a few numbers back and forth, finally settling on a price, with free express postage thrown in! They arrived within 24 hours, and were everything that I’d hoped them to be!
As you can see, these cufflinks are the exact same size, and design as the sterling silver pair in my previous posting. For this reason, I figured that they were made during the same era – the late 1920s through the 1930s, and manufactured by the Melbourne-based firm of G. Damman’s, which held a large jeweler’s and tobacconists’s premises on the corners of Swanston & Collins Streets in the Melbourne CBD.
The storefront of Damman’s, Tobacconists & Jewelers, 211-213 Collins Street, Melbourne
I do not know for what reason, nor under what circumstances cufflinks of such quality were manufactured for, and sold by, the school, and we may never know, but the fact that they exist at all is tantalising and fascinating! I absolutely love having both sets in my collection, and I think I can safely say that I would never, ever sell them!
Damman’s Tobacconists & Jewelers, Melbourne. Ca. 1963
Where the hell would I ever find another set!?
One of the most unusual elements about this whole story is where the cufflinks came from – not Melbourne, not even Victoria. No! They came all the way from Queensland, up near Brisbane!
How on earth a pair of antique gold high school cufflinks from Melbourne ended up in a suburb just outside Brisbane on the other end of the country is anyone’s guess, but now they’re back home in Melbourne where they belong, and safe in the company of their silver brethren!
The DAMMAN’S STG SIL mark for Australian sterling silverThe DAMMAN’S 9CT mark for 9-karat gold
Other Scotch College Memorabilia
Along with gold and silver cufflinks, the school also commissioned everything from chinaware and cups, glasses, tie-bars, tie-pins, badges, cigarette lighters (also commissioned from Damman’s Jewelers) and stationery. You can still buy a lot of this stuff (OK, maybe not the lighters) from the school, brand-new, or if you’re after something vintage, then online.
I’m very pleased to be given the chance to add these, possibly quite rare, cufflinks to my collection, where they can rest alongside their sterling silver brethren!
So, here’s something that I picked up at my local flea-market on the weekend. It was dusty, grimy, battered, and very, very faded. Despite that, a cursory examination told me that it was actually in excellent condition, despite being, what I judged, to be upwards of 100+ years old! It took me all of five minutes to decide that I really wanted this, and haggled a discounted price with the stallholder, and trotted away a very, very happy young man.
Once I got the folio home, I started examining it in more detail.
The more I looked at it, the more it appeared to me that this beautiful leather-good was significantly older than I initially believed. The styling of the pockets, as well as their general orientation and size, as well as the tri-opening panels, were all reminiscent of men’s wallets from the Edwardian era of the early 1900s – only – larger. Much larger!
Added to these observations was the fact that the folio was devoid of any modern features. No zippers, no snap-buttons, no elastic strap to hold it shut, no plastic of any kind, and – surprisingly – no indication at all – of where it was made! There wasn’t a thing on it, or in it, to tell me anything about it! No maker’s marks, no company logos, trademarks, company names, retailers’ addresses…nothing!
Once I got it home, I started the restoration process. This mostly consisted of double-checking, and reinforcing any loose or missing stitching – and going through the original needle-holes, where possible, to hold the folio together (fortunately, there wasn’t much of this which had to be done!). The next step was to clean the leather, and then came the labourous task of polishing it.
For this, I used ordinary dark tan boot-polish…and my right hand. Honestly, I just find it so much easier to apply shoe polish with your fingers, than fiddling around with a cloth or polishing rag of some kind. I just scooped it up, smeared it onto the leather, and started rubbing it in with my fingers. Once it was on, I just used a regular buffing brush to distribute and work the polish into the grain, spreading it out, and in, as I went. This was the real calorie-burner! I started on the outside and worked my way in, removing the belt entirely because it’d just get in the way (I polished that separately, later on).
The next thing to do was to do the interior. This was much more fiddly because of all the pockets and sleeves, but I got there in the end. Here, you can see what the folio looked like originally, vs. what it looked like when I was done…
Originally, the entire folio was this sort of…paper-bag brown. You can still see hints of the original colour showing through, where it had faded over the years (this also accounts for the uneven colour-distribution on the left and right). The interior received the same hand-applied polish and brushing, and then the entire thing was rubbed all over with a generous amount of dubbin.
Here you can see the final product, with the folio closed-up and belted…
…and the other side…
One element which I really loved was the decorative tooling around the belt-loop:
And finally, the interior…
If you look on the right, you might be able to see a light discolouration – a horizontal line running across the middle of the panel – that’s the result of the strap or belt being fastened across it for years and years, and the leather fading as a result.
Here it is fully opened…
On the left are three pockets (two small ones on top, one big one underneath). Next to them is the loop or sleeve to hold a writing instrument. The loop is VERY small. It will hold a pencil, or a dip pen, but that’s about it! Part of the restoration will have to involve enlarging (or replacing) this loop so that the folio can actually store at least one, decent sized fountain pen for the future!
The central panel holds one large pocket for storing documents, and three smaller ones for storing stamps and cards. Finally, on the right is one more large pocket, again for storing papers and documents. If you look very close, you can see the remains of an elastic strap sewn into the leather bordering, which would’ve been used to hold a notebook in place. Replacing that will be another part of the restoration.
Restoring the Folio
Apart from cleaning, polishing and rubbing in beeswax, the folio needed a few minor repairs and alterations. I hand-sewed some of the corners and edges where the stitching had come undone, to hold the folio together and to stop the pockets from tearing. Where possible I used the original stitch-holes to keep things neat, and also to preserve the integrity of the leather.
The next step was replacing the pen-loop. The original loop was extremely small and a pencil barely fit inside. To remove it, I cut away the original stitching using a pocketknife, removed the old leather forming the loop, used it as a pattern to cut a new piece of very thin leather, folded it over, stuck it inside, and using my sewing machine, I sewed the new loop back into place where the old one had been – again, using the original stitching-holes to try and keep things neat. The change is barely perceptible, but now, the new loop can actually hold a pen! I deliberately sewed the new loop out from the seam by about half a centimeter or thereabouts, so that it could fit a decent-sized modern fountain pen (and most vintage ones, too).
The final step in the restoration was sewing in a new, black elastic book strap (see above). To do this, I cut the stitches around the old book strap, removed the worn out remains of the old elastic, fed the new elastic through the same hole and sewed it back in. Then I stretched the elastic across, repeated the same thing on the other side, and sewed that in as well. To get the tension right (if it’s too loose, the book will just flop around everywhere), I measured the length, and then cut off two inches so that the elastic would have to stretch the last two inches, giving the right tension.
And here’s the final result:
As you can see, there have been a few changes. The enlarged pen-loop will now hold a modern cartridge-converter sized fountain pen (the pen in question is a Montblanc No. 145), and it has been made out of leather of a very similar shade to the original. In time, it will age to look more or less exactly the same.
The black elastic strap now holds the book in place, allowing me to flip it over either side, and access the two large pockets without having to remove the book entirely.
Pocketknives are fascinating little gadgets. Whether it’s a tiny 2.1/2-inch quill-knife, or a larger 5 or 6-inch stiletto, pocketknives have been part of our lives for centuries. Carried and used for everything from survival situations to cutting open boxes that come through the mail from eBay, opening mail, eating food, carving, cutting, slicing, opening cans, or even something as mundane as sharpening a pencil – pocketknives have been the go-to mainstay tool for all these tasks for generations.
My current knife collection
Collecting pocketknives is a highly popular hobby. Most knives are relatively cheap, portable, robust, and don’t take up a great deal of space. The wide variety of knife-patterns, blade-types, decorative elements, manufacturers and sizes in pocketknives is what makes them so collectible, and knives from famous manufacturers, made of rare or precious materials, or which were limited editions, can command high prices on the secondhand market.
In this posting, I’ll be talking about the general restoration process behind breathing new life into the type of pocketknife that most people will be familiar with: The standard slip-joint pocketknife, as typified by those made by W.R. Case, Victorinox, J. Rodgers & Sons, Southern & Richardson, and countless other manufacturers during the 1800s, and the majority of the 20th century.
Basic Knife Anatomy
In this posting, I’ll be talking about slip-joint knives: the kind of knife with a blade that folds back into the handle, so everything going forward, will relate to this style of knife.
To begin at the beginning, we need to know what the various parts of the knife are.
The body of the knife is made up of various components, which are stacked, one on top of the other, and held together with metallic rods.
On the outsides, working our way in, we have the bolsters. Not all knives have these. Some do, some don’t. Some have them on both sides of the knife, some only have them on one side. Bolsters are the flat, metallic panels at either end of a pocketknife. They’re usually brass, nickel-silver, stainless steel or some other corrosion-resistant metal. Their purpose is to strengthen the knife, and to protect the covers or scales on the sides of the handle, from damage.
Southern & Richardson cutlers, advertising a pocketknife with nickel-silver covers, and a built-in magnifying glass
Covers, also called scales, are the large, decorative panels which make up the majority of the bulk on the handle of a folding knife. Covers can be simply utilitarian, and be made of plastic, or steel or brass, but usually, they’re decorative. Pocketknives have had scales or covers made of anything from sterling silver to mother of pearl, ivory, bone, horn, any number of a variety of different woods, and various types of plastics in any number of finishes. Depending on the knife, scales may be smooth, or corrugated/textured. Textured scales are typically added to a knife to make it easier to grip.
Inlaid into the scales are (although, not always) small, metal panels, which can be almost any shape – rectangular, shield, circular…the list goes on. These are sometimes included for the purposes of embellishment (and to give the customer a place to engrave something like a name, date, or initials), or else, will contain details such as the company’s name, logo, or other trademark. These small panels are known as shields, badges or plates, depending on which name-convention you take to heart. Not all knives have these, but most will. They’re usually made of either brass, or nickel-silver.
The bolsters and the scales fit onto flat strips of metal, known as liners. Usually, they’re made of brass, so as not to rust and jam the knife.
Between the scales, bolsters and liners is the spring. The spring is the flat strip of metal at the bottom of the knife (or the top of the handle, if holding the knife with the blade-edge facing down). The spring is made of spring steel, which is nice and flexible. The spring is what holds the blades of the knife open, or closed.
Finally, you have the blades of the knife. Anything that comes out of a knife is known as a ‘blade’, regardless of whether it actually is a blade, or not. Knives can have anywhere from one, to two, three, four, or more blades, and extra features, depending on the knife’s size, and complexity. I won’t cover all this here, because otherwise we’ll be here all day.
Finally, the knife is held together with pins and rivets. The pins are driven through the bolsters, liners, and blades, and are then hammered and peened over, and smoothed off, to hold the knife together. Smaller rivets or pins are used to hold the scales or covers onto the liners, to stop them from coming loose.
The factory of Joseph Rodgers & Sons, Cutlers, Norfolk St., Sheffield, UK.
A standard slip-joint folding pocketknife will have two pins for holding in the blades and bolsters (one pin on each end of the knife), a third pin in the middle, to hold the spring in place along with the liners and covers/scales, and usually (but not always) extra pins or rivets to hold the scales in place. As with the liners, the pins or rivets are usually brass, nickel-silver, or stainless steel.
Some pocketknives have additional features, such as the very popular lockback mechanism. The lockback mechanism is a toggle or button located at the back of the knife. When the knife is opened, the ‘lock’ prevents the back-spring from shifting, keeping the blade steady while you’re using it. Pressing the toggle depresses the back-spring, which allows the exposed blade to be unlocked and swung back into the closed position. Lockback mechanisms are popular because they prevent the knife from closing unexpectedly if the blade is being used for particularly aggressive tasks (carving, splitting firewood, cutting particularly difficult materials, etc). Because of this, it’s usually seen as a safety mechanism, to prevent user injury.
Blade Anatomy
Now that we’ve covered basic pocketknife anatomy, let’s cover blade-anatomy. At one end you have the point, at the other end, you have the heel. Behind the heel you have the tang. The tang is the part of the blade through which the rivets and pins are passed to hold the blade to the handle. The tang is also where information such as the knife model, or manufacturer-details, are stamped.
At the bottom of the blade you have the edge, at the top, you have the spine. In between is the belly, or main body of the blade. Just below the spine you will have a slit or groove, commonly called a nail-nick or nail-pull. This is the indent which you put your fingernail into, to pull the blade open from the handle.
Buying Antique and Vintage Pocketknives
Pocketknives range from the mundane to the magnificent, from the pedestrian to the precious. Part of the thrill of owning them – of owning any collection – is the thrill of the hunt!
Antique and vintage pocketknives are highly collectible, and they can often be found in antiques shops or flea-markets for a handful of dollars, or online, for significantly more. In buying vintage folding pocketknives, you want to check a number of aspects before coughing up the money.
First and foremost – make sure that the knife is complete. Are all the scales there? Are there any missing pins? Dropped-off bolsters? Broken blades? I know that a lot of knives look very solidly made, but bolsters, pins and scales can all drop off over time, and you want to make sure that all aspects of the knife are firm and tight before you go any further. I bought a pocketknife once which was so badly constructed, it literally fell apart in my hands one day, and I had to throw it out.
Does your knife do that?
No? Good.
Next: Make sure (and this is very important) that the knife is as free from rust as it’s possible for it to be. Unless they’ve been very well cared for, almost all vintage pocketknives will have some sort of rusting on them. Age-spots or pitting may also present themselves, but rust is the real enemy here.
Rust can spread, rust can compromise the integrity of the blade, rust can even cause the knife to snap in half! Any knives with a LOT of rust should be avoided entirely.
After that, make sure that the knife actually functions! Do the blades open? Are they easy to open? Are they stiff? Can you yank them out without snapping your fingernails off? Once opened, do the blades stay open? Do they flop around? Is there any side-to-side wobble? When closed, do they stay closed? Do the blades strike each other (or the liners) when closing next to each other?
I’ve seen some beautiful pocketknives which looked flawless…until you tried to use them. Knives should have nice, strong springs that will cause the blades to ‘snap’ – meaning that the spring will have enough tension on it that the blades will click open or shut, with an audible ‘snap!’ each time. You do not want a knife with weak, floppy springs, that can’t hold the blades open or shut – it’s a safety risk! Put the knife down, and keep searching.
Similarly (on multi-blade knives), make sure that the blades close properly. You don’t want a knife where one blade constantly strikes another blade when closing – it damages the blade, wastes time, means you have to sharpen it more, indicates that the knife is falling apart (or was poorly made), and it’s a safety issue!
Restoring your Pocketknives
Once you’ve purchased your knife, the next thing to do is to breathe new life into it. A lot of vintage knives spend years, decades, in drawers and shoe-boxes, down the back of the couch, and god knows where else! And they are hardly ever looked after. If you expect that beautiful horn-scaled pen-knife that you bought for $30.00 to work like new – it’s now your job to try and give that knife a new lease on life – to ensure that it does work like new!…Or as near to new as it’s possible for it to do so.
This next section of the posting is all about tips and tricks to restore your pocketknives to working condition. All this advice and guidance is assuming that you’re an everyday collector with no prior experience in fixing stuff. No fancy tools or equipment are involved in this, and everything mentioned should be stuff that you can find around the house (or which is easily purchased). These instructions will assume that the knife will remain whole and intact during the entire process. No disassembly will be required.
You will need…
A box of tissues.
Cotton-buds/Q-tips.
Extra-fine-grit sandpaper (as fine as you can get).
0000-grade steel wool (designed for polishing).
A thin, highly fluid, lubricating oil (for sewing machines, or similar).
Polishing paste or fluid (eg: Brasso).
Sharpening stones.
Water.
Optional: Ultrasonic Cleaner.
The first thing to do is to remove all the surface grime. This can easily be done with some oil, and tissue-paper. Drip some oil over the body of the knife and blades, and fill the cavity in the handle with oil, then wipe and sponge it away with some tissues. This will remove any surface grime, grit, and other easily removed detritus. It is important to use oil as much as possible, and not water, as water will encourage rusting, and the spread of any existing rust, which is the last thing you want to happen.
Once the initial cleaning has been completed and you’ve removed as much crud as possible, the next step is the much more fiddly process of removing grime from between the springs and pivot-points inside the knife. This could take a few hours, a few days, or even a week or more, depending on the condition of the knife.
One of the biggest nightmares with vintage pocketknives are all the problems associated with stiff, jerky, jammed blades. Blades which are difficult to pull open, difficult to push shut, which don’t snap into place, and which jam and stick when they’re being used. Not only is this annoying, painful on your fingernails because you can’t get the damn blades open, and wastes time, it’s also a big safety-risk, since all the extra effort required to manipulate the knife can leave you prone to injuries. Nobody wants to fight with a stuck blade only for it to spring open unexpectedly and cut them.
Cleaning the Springs and Pivots
It’s for these reasons that the next step is so important: Flushing out the back-springs and pivots on your knife. It’s a fiddly, messy, time-consuming job – something best done while watching YouTube videos or listening to music, or enjoying a good movie – but it is nonetheless a necessary evil.
Get some tissue-paper and fold it until you have a soft pad. Place it on a hard surface like a tabletop. Flood the pivot-points and back-spring of your knife where-ever there is movement. Open and close the blades several times – dozens of times, hundreds of times. If necessary, you can wrap the blades in tissue-paper so that you can grip the blades safely while you open and close them – this will minimise the chance of cutting yourself, and will help you maintain a firm grip on the blades.
Every few dozen manipulations, close the knife and, pressing the spring-side of the handle against the pad of tissue-paper, rub it vigorously back and forth several times.
Now, watch in horror as black, grey, brown, gunky slime comes oozing out of the knife and all over your pad of tissues.
All these black, grimy streaks come from the crud and grunge trapped inside the knife between the liners, springs and pivot-points. The more of this stuff you remove, the smoother your knife will open and close
Ever wondered why your knives keep jamming? Ever wondered why they’re so damn stiff, and difficult to open? Ever wondered why your fingernails keep breaking every time you try and yank out a blade?
This is why.
The black sludge you see coming out of the knife is years, decades’-worth of grime, dust and other things caught up inside the knife-mechanism, which causes friction, abrasion and jamming. Since pocketknives are usually very close-fitting, it takes a minuscule amount of this grime to cause a lot of problems. Now imagine what a large amount of this grime causes!
Continue to flush, manipulate, and rub the back of the knife with tissue-paper as rigorously as you can. Filling the knife with oil washes out the grime. Manipulating the blades and springs shifts and loosens the dirt while also working the oil through the knife mechanism. Wiping the knife across the tissue-paper draws the grime-clogged oil out of the knife via capillary action, removing the grit that’s causing all the friction and jamming.
This process can be quite involved. It could take hours, days, even weeks to accomplish. You have to keep going until the oil that comes out of the knife is as clear as when it went in. The more of the grime you remove, the better the end-result will be.
Simply oiling the knife will not improve it. All you’ll do is shift the grime around, and attract even more dust into the knife. When the oil dries up (and it will), the knife will simply jam all over again. Flushing the grime out with oil and wicking it away with tissue-paper is the only way to really get the knife clean and functional, short of drilling out the pins and tearing the knife apart to its component pieces in order to clean them individually.
While you’re cleaning the springs, make sure you remove as much grime from around the pivots as well, by using a similar method. Flood the knife with oil, work the blades to shift the oil, and then stuff a folded wad of tissue-paper into the knife and into the gaps around the pivots to draw out the oil and grime trapped inside.
The more you do this, the less crud there will be inside the knife and the smoother the knife will operate when you’re finally done. When done properly, the knife should (in most cases, anyway) have blades which will open and close with a nice sharp ‘snap!’ as it should do, when new. If the blades still jam or stick, then continue the process, until they don’t. If you use your knife often, then you should repeat this process every few years to prevent even more build-up of grime that will be harder to remove later.
Rust Removal
When the knife has reached this stage (or as close to that stage as you can), then the next step is to remove as much rust (if any) as you can from the knife.
Rust builds up where there’s steel – specifically the back-spring, the blades, and their tangs. In the old days, blades were protected from rusting by polishing them to a shine, and either plating them (usually with nickel), or else by keeping them oiled. In instances where the nickel-plating is intact, minor polishing with a liquid polish such as Brasso will be enough to restore the shine and remove the surface-rust, if any.
Heavier rusting will require the use of either a chemical rust-remover, or else, a gentle abrasive such as extra-fine steel wool, or a combination of 0000-grade steel wool and some oil, or polishing liquid to act as lubricant. It will remove the rust, polish the blade, and so long as the blades are kept dry – will prevent the return of any extra rust. Removing rust from either side of the back-spring can be done with fine sandpaper and oil, or with clumps of 0000-grade steel wool, and finished off with a suitable metal polish.
Removing Chips and Cracks
When buying antiques, one of the most common things one has to think about is what one can comfortably afford, what one is willing to pay for an item, and what kinds of compromises one is willing to accept in order to get the object that they truly desire.
As I’ve mentioned in other postings about buying antiques: The more things you’re willing to compromise on, the wider the range (and the cheaper the prices), of things you’re able to buy.
If you do buy a knife with a chipped or cracked blade, however, you still need to try and buy the best that you can. Typically speaking, any chips that you might find should be as small as possible (ideally, no more than 1-2mm), and any cracks should be near the tip of the blade. This makes them easier to deal with.
If you do find a knife that you really like, that you would love to buy, but which does have a tiny little niggling chip that might be dissuading you from forking out the money – don’t worry! There are ways of fixing this!
Sharpening Your Knife
For reasons of safety, sharpening your pocketknives should always be the last thing that you do, once all other restorative processes have been completed. Trying to clean, polish, lubricate, or otherwise restore a knife with freshly sharpened blades in the way invites unnecessary danger, and should be avoided if possible.
To sharpen your knife, you’ll need 2-3 different sharpening stones. A coarse-grit one, a medium-grit and a fine-grit one. Depending on how blunt your knife is, you’ll want to start on the medium and then progress to fine, or coarse then medium, and maybe after that (if necessary) progress to fine.
Before you start on this, though – we need to deal with any of those tiny chips that I mentioned earlier.
If your blade does have chips – provided that they’re small and don’t bite into the belly of the blade too far – then this is when we get rid of them!
First – identify any chips. Then – get your coarsest sharpening stone. Lubricate it with water, and start running your blade – edge down – across the stone, like you’re trying to cut the stone in half with your knife. Make sure that the blade-edge is level on the stone as you do this, and that the blade isn’t angled to the left or right while doing this.
By ‘cutting’ across the stone like this, what you’re doing is scraping off excess metal from the blade-edge. This will wear down the edge until it meets up with the top of the chip that you’re trying to grind out. It’s for this reason that this trick really only works with SMALL chips – anything larger than 1-2mm (unless it’s a REALLY big knife!) will grind off too much metal for this little blade-hack to work on.
It’s worth noting that if you do have to do this – you should do it BEFORE you sharpen the blade, since obviously, grinding the blade like this will affect the edge.
Keep grinding down the edge until just before the nick disappears. Once you reach this spot, sharpen the knife as per-usual, starting on the coarse stone, and then moving to medium and then fine. The usual sharpening process will remove the last vestiges of the chip, leaving you with a clean, sharp, straight blade!
The Correct Sharpening Procedure
I’ve been sharpening knives for years – when you collect pocketknives and straight razors, it’s something you absolutely have to learn. It’s too damn expensive to ask somebody else to do it every single time!
Lubricate your chosen sharpening stones with plenty of water (I usually use a spray-bottle for this), and start from the coarsest grit and work your way up to finest. Exactly how coarse you start depends on how blunt the knife is. In most cases, a medium-to-fine sharpening will do, but for really terrible blades, coarse-medium-fine may have to be used.
Once the stones have been selected and lubricated (you may need to keep lubricating them as you sharpen), it’s time to sharpen the blades.
To stop your stones sliding all over the place – either put them into their bases (if bases they have), or else, put them on top of a small towel or flannel to hold them in place.
Place the knife-blade flat down on the surface, and raise the blade to about 10-15 degrees (or 45 degrees, then half of that, then half of that again), to get the right angle. Start drawing the knife, edge-first, back and forth across the stone at least two dozen times. Repeat for the other side of the blade. Then move up to the next least-coarse stone, and then up to the finest, repeating the two-dozen strokes per-side for each stone as you go along.
Once fully sharpened, cleaned and dried, you should be able to see (and feel) the blade’s sharpness. Hold it up to the light. A freshly sharpened blade will have a very thin, white line along the very edge of the blade (the burr). The burr is the excess metal that’s been ground off the blade during the sharpening process. If you run your finger across the blade, you might even be able to feel the soft prickliness of the tiny flakes of metal scraped off in the sharpening process.
Closing Remarks
Now that your knife has been flushed out, de-grimed, de-rusted, sharpened, and nursed back to health, it should be ready to give you many decades of excellent service.
Shimmering, ethereal, translucent and magical, for thousands upon thousands of years, pearls have been one of mankind’s most sought-after treasures, one of natures greatest mysteries, since the dawn of civilisation.
In this posting we’ll be looking at what pearls are, where they come from, how they’re formed, and how they have been cherished, treasured, and hunted for by countless millions of people across millennia of time.
What is a Pearl?
A ‘pearl’ is the name given to the hard, glossy, smooth and shimmering secretion formed inside of a hard-shelled mollusk (a type of shellfish), usually round in shape, and ranging between a few milimeters, to a couple of centimetres in diameter, depending on the size of the mollusk, and the age of the pearl.
What are Pearls Made Of?
Pearls are made of a sticky, glossy secretion produced by the mollusk – a kind of slime or goo or gel, which is used by the mollusk as a defense mechanism. This secretion is known as ‘nacre’, or more commonly, as ‘Mother of Pearl’, because it’s the substance that ‘mothers’ or ‘births’ the pearls that are found inside oysters.
How are Pearls Formed?
Pearls – which may be freshwater, or saltwater, and which can vary greatly in size, colour, and shape, depending on the circumstances of their creation – are formed when an intruder (organic matter of some kind, such as a parasite, worm or other living creature) breaches the mollusk’s outer defenses (the shell), and tries to attack the mollusk itself.
To defend against infection, parasites or attack, the mollusk expels a gob of liquid nacre, which will drown and envelope the invading organism, stopping it from carrying out its dastardly deed of killing, or infecting the mollusk, or of trying to make the shell its new home. The nacre hardens, and the mollusk will continue to expel more and more nacre over the offending intruder over time. With each successive secretion, the nacre will harden, and form layers of glossy enamel over the top of existing layers.
Finally, the nacre shell over the intruding matter will grow large enough that the oyster will consider it safe enough to detach the nacre-encrusted organism (aka – a pearl!) from the interior wall of the shell in which the mollusk lives – and the pearl will simply sit in the oyster or mussel or abalone – until it is expelled if or when the oyster next opens its shell. If it isn’t, or can’t be removed by the mollusk, then the pearl remains inside the oyster until it might, possibly, be found by humans!
This is what creates pearls, and causes them to grow. The size of the pearl, and its colour, depends on the colour of the mollusk, the size of the shell which the mollusk lives in, and how long it decides it has to attack the intruder, before it feels safe again. The pearl’s shape is determined, again by the size of the mollusk, but also by the shape and size of the intruder which has triggered the mollusk’s defense mechanism.
Along with making the spherical baubles known as pearls, nacre is also the substance that creates the very shells themselves which the mollusks call home. The only difference between the shell, and the pearl, is that the shell is the hard, protective receptacle for the mollusk inside, whereas the pearl is formed (through similar processes) to protect the mollusk from anything that bypasses its first line of defense.
Diving for Pearls
With enough determination, anybody can find a gold mine, or a silver mine, or even a cluster of gemstones hidden inside the Earth. The veins of ore having been discovered, just need to be dug out, crushed, extracted and refined.
Finding pearls, by comparison, is much harder.
While there are countless millions of mollusks of all kinds in the world’s oceans, from oysters to abalones to mussels, only those which have been attacked, and have had their shells breached or otherwise compromised by an invader, might produce a pearl. Only those pearl-bearing mollusks which exist within the range of free-diving water-depths might be found by humans, and only a small percentage of those found will even have pearls inside them. In fact, the chances of finding a pearl in an oyster is something along the lines of 1 pearl per 10,000 mollusks – a 0.01% probability.
Along with the sheer randomness and rarity of pearls – especially – of finding enough pearls of the same size for use in jewelry-making – was the risk entailed in finding pearls.
Anybody can dig a hole and search for diamonds, or shovel the soil from a riverbed to pan for gold – but diving – sometimes several tens of meters – to find pearl-oysters and abalones – was a disorienting and dangerous profession – one which dates back to prehistory in many parts of the world, ranging from Madagascar to China, Greece and Italy, and Indonesia to the Philippines. The risk of drowning, decompression sickness, paralysis, disorientation, or being attacked by sea-creatures – all added to the mystique of pearls.
It is for all these reasons that pearls, for centuries and centuries and centuries, dating back for thousands of years – have been considered one of the most valuable gems ever. The sheer randomness of being able to find a pearl out there in the deep, swirling depths of the oceans is what made them so treasured.
Myths about Pearls
Given the rare and random nature of pearls, it is not surprising that there’s loads of myths about pearls, such as the fact that pearls are formed inside oysters from constant irritation of the mollusk inside. This is not strictly true – pearls are formed due to ONE irritant at a time entering the shell, against which the mollusk defends itself.
Another common myth is that all pearls are perfectly round spheres! Again, this is not true. In fact, it’s so not true that perfectly round pearls are probably the hardest types of pearls to find! In truth – pearls can be almost any shape. Being organically and naturally formed, the shape of pearls is dictated by the size of the mollusk, and by the size or shape of the irritant or invader which caused the mollusk to start forming a pearl in the first place.
Irregularly shaped pearls – which can be anything from flat discs to ovals, pill-shaped or pear-shaped – are called “Baroque” pearls – referring to their erratic shapes and lack of uniformity. In fact, finding enough perfectly round pearls of the same size, shape, and colour to form an entire pearl necklace is a feat so difficult to accomplish that for centuries, pearl necklaces were considered to be one of the greatest status symbols in the world! Literally hundreds of pearls would have to be found, sorted through, and finally, drilled and threaded – in order to create such a piece of jewelry – a feat which could take months, or even years to accomplish.
Pearls as Status Symbols
Because of the significant difficulties in finding pearls, and of finding enough of them to make jewelry with, pearls have been seen as a status symbol since the times of the Ancient Romans. Emperors, kings, queens, dukes and princes, have all used pearls as jewelry at one time or another. Indeed, pearls were so hard to find that they were often more highly prized than most other jewels – such as diamonds, for example!
Baroque pearls – those of irregular shapes – were often used to adorn crowns and coronets, because their odd shapes lent themselves to artistic creativity. This can be seen, for example, in the pearl tiara of the Empress Eugenie of France.
A String of Pearls
In the history of gems and jewelry, there are numerous famous stories. The Hope Diamond, the Star of India, and the Plant-Cartier Necklace!
…You’ve never heard of the Plant and Cartier necklace?
Morton F. Plant, a wealthy New York City financier and philanthropist, owned two houses in New York City in the early 20th century. Deciding that his original house was too close to Manhattan’s bustling commercial district of Fifth Avenue, Plant commissioned the building of another mansion (completed in 1916), further away, to give him more comfort and privacy.
The problem was finding a buyer for his original house – until his wife, Mae Plant – informed her darling husband that she wanted a new pearl necklace!
At the same time, Pierre Cartier, grandson of the founder of the famous, French jewelry house, was looking into expanding his family’s business further abroad. Cartier already had a commercial presence in Paris, and now London, but he was determined to go even further, and try and break into the American market! The only challenge was that he needed a commanding, central location on Fifth Avenue! Surely, nothing else would suffice!
When he heard that the Plant Mansion was up for sale, Cartier immediately became interested, but despite nonstop haggling and debating, neither Cartier, nor Plant, could come to an agreement on price – until Plant told Cartier that his wife was looking for a new pearl necklace!
Mrs. Plant wearing the Cartier double-strand pearl necklace that cost as much as a house!
Seizing on any opportunity to buy the Plant mansion, Cartier told Plant about a stunning pearl necklace that he had in his possession – 128 flawless matched pearls in a double-strand! The most perfect gift for Madame Plant, surely! As Cartier suspected, Plant was immediately interested. After all, the pearls only cost $1,000,000…
Finally, Plant agreed! $100 cash, and a $1,000,000 pearl necklace, in exchange for prime real estate on Fifth Avenue! Plant was happy because he got the pearl necklace that his wife was so eager for, and Cartier was happy, because he got the central New York location that he was so eager to buy! Mrs. Plant owned the necklace until her death in 1956!
The Morton F. Plant Mansion (AKA the Cartier Building) on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan.
As for the Plant mansion on Fifth Avenue? It has remained Cartier’s most famous New York location for over 100 years! The company took formal ownership of the building in 1917…and hasn’t left since!
Cultured Pearls
In 1917, a pearl necklace was enough to buy a house. A very, very nice house.
In 1918, a pearl necklace would be lucky to buy you a car!
This was because of something dramatic which happened in 1917, which turned the entire jewelry industry upside-down!
Since time immemorial, pearls had been naturally formed – discovered by chance on the seabed by divers and fishermen who scooped oysters and mussels up from the depths, to find these lustrous baubles shimmering inside their shells. Finding a pearl – any kind of pearl – was entirely a matter of luck. This immense rarity was what made them so incredibly valuable. But everything changed when, thousands of miles away from Plant, Cartier, and their New York real-estate deal, a man in Japan discovered how to grow pearls!
That man was Kokichi Mikimoto.
Building on discoveries made by Australian, and other Japanese researchers, that pearls are formed when an irritant enters an oyster, Mikimoto was one of the first people in history to successfully use this knowledge to create a pearl in an oyster through human intervention!
Thus began the age of cultured pearls.
Cultured pearls are created when a human agent inserts an irritant, or ‘nucleus’ (either shell fragments or pieces of mantle from another oyster) into a living oyster. The oyster, thus irritated, will start to secrete nacre around the intruder, growing a pearl, replicating what would have happened in nature anyway, but in a more controlled environment. This increases the yield of pearls, or at least, the chances of finding one – but it does not speed up the creation of pearls. You might still get a pearl, and you may get more than one, but they’ll still take months, or even years to form!
That said, creating cultured pearls is not nearly as easy as you might think! Remember – pearl formation is largely down to luck – even when human intervention takes place! Of 100 oysters manipulated in this way, maybe 50 might produce pearls, and of those fifty, maybe five might produce pearls of usable size and shape. There’s still a lot of guesswork and patience, even if you have tampered with the deck.
0.01% for natural pearls. 5.00% for cultured pearls. While that’s a significant jump in the chances of finding pearls, they’re still fairly rare. In the 21st century, natural pearls – those formed by chance – comprise just 1% of all pearls, and the other 99% are made up of cultured pearls.
While cultured pearls are cheaper because they can be produced more readily, differences in quality still remain. While on the outside, they might look the same, the difference is only seen when the pearls are cut open (or x-rayed). To increase the chances of pearl-formation, the irritant placed inside the living oyster is usually quite large – between 5-8mm across! This might not seem large, but when you consider that most pearls only grow to around 1.5 – 2.0cm in diameter, that irritant is taking up a lot of space!
So what’s the trade-off?
Pearl farming or oyster farming allows mankind to produce pearls more readily, and of a more uniform shape and size. It’s not an exact science – but it does greatly increase the chances of making pearls. The trade-off in manmade vs natural pearls is the quality of the pearls produced.
The impact of cultured pearls can be seen in this famous, 1928 photograph of actress Louise Brooks, one of the great screen stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Such a profusion of pearls would’ve been impossibly expensive just twenty years before, but by the 1920s…
Natural pearls, formed by chance in the ocean – usually have very small irritants – a wisp of organic matter or a tiny parasite entering a pearl-oyster might create a pearl – but when it does – the pearl formed will be comprised almost entirely of nacre, with the irritant that caused its creation being only a tiny, almost imperceptible speck inside the pearl.
By comparison, manmade, cultured pearls, rely on much larger irritants to greatly increase the chances of pearl-formation. The result is a pearl that will have a very large irritant or nucleus, buried under the nacre.
What’s the problem with this? Well – if the pearl cracks, or splits, or is damaged or altered while drilling or cutting (to make jewelry, for example), then the nucleus is much more evident (a speck 5mm across in a pearl only 10mm wide, is going to be pretty obvious!). Because of the size of the irritant or nucleus used to form cultured pearls, the layers of nacre over the top are much thinner, more fragile, and more prone to damage.
It is because of this that cultured pearls, while more common, are cheaper, and natural pearls, being extremely rare, are still very expensive.
The difference is most clearly noticeable under an x-ray, or when a pearl is sliced in half. A cultured pearl has a larger nucleus and a thin outer layer of nacre, while a natural pearl will have a tiny nucleus, and several overlapping layers of nacre – similar to the rings on a tree.
Although natural pearls are, of course, of much higher quality – the creation of cultured pearls flooded the market, and caused pearl values to plummet almost overnight!
Remember Mae Plant’s pearl necklace? Sold in 1917 for $1,000,000, 40 years later, when she died in 1956 and it was sold at auction by her children, it fetched just… $150,000. By then, cultured pearls were so common that even a large double-strand of natural pearls were not seen as being particularly valuable anymore.
Shells and Mother of Pearl
So. We’ve covered pearls, we’ve covered oysters, we’ve covered cultured pearls…but what about mother-of-pearl? What’s that?
Mother of Pearl, or nacre, the substance that forms pearls – is secreted by the mollusk (oyster, abalone, clam, etc) – inside its happy little home – the shell.
As nacre is the mollusk’s natural defense mechanism, there’s usually a lot of it lying around, and the insides (and even outsides!) of shells are often coated in thick layers of this shimmering, glimmering, literally pearlescent material.
The glistening interior of an abalone shell.
Because of this, mollusk shells (everything from large abalone shells, to smaller oyster shells, or even the shells of the mighty, chambered nautilus!), are often just as prized as the pearls they produce. Often called mother-of-pearl (to differentiate between the pearls themselves), mollusk shell nacre is commonly used in all kinds of applications, either for jewelry, or other types of decoration and embellishment.
A folding fan made out of thin slices of mother-of-pearl, taken from a (or likely, several) suitably large mollusk shells
Knife handles, razor scales, cutlery handles, jewelry, box-lids, cufflinks and countless other items can be made of (or decorated with) mother of pearl.
Mother of pearl for decorative purposes is sourced by using the leftover shells from mollusks. Once the shell has been emptied of its contents (the tasty, tasty mollusks, and any pearls that they might contain), the shell itself is cleaned, sanded, and polished. Almost every mollusk shell will have some sort of growth on the outside – barnacles, seaweed, etc, which will obscure the outermost layer of nacre on the surface of the outside of the shell, and with great care, this must be removed. Using progressively finer abrasives, the encrusted sand, barnacles and other detritus can be scraped and polished off of the shell’s surface, and the glimmering nacre underneath can be exposed! Now all the remains is to polish it to a glossy, reflective finish!
Especially large mollusk shells with beautiful nacre have been used to make everything from caskets and caddies, to trinket dishes, sewing cases, and even jewelry boxes.
The relative ease with which mother-of-pearl, as opposed to pearls themselves, may be found, has therefore made it one of the most popular decorative materials to work with for centuries. Easily carved and shaped, and able to be polished to a lustrous shine, it remains popular even today in everything from jewelry to pocketknives, buttons and hair-accessories.
Pearls in Fiction and Literature
Their rarity, size, colouration, shape and expense made pearls extremely popular plot-devices in fiction, myths, legends and ancient fables.
The very first work of fiction to feature the serial killer, Sweeney Todd, was titled ‘The String of Pearls’. Pearls are mentioned in the bible, and in the writings of Ancient Roman historian and statesman, Pliny the Elder (whose nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79AD).
Even Sherlock Holmes tangled with pearls, when, in 1904, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Six Napoleons”, which featured “the famous Black Pearl of the Borgias!” as the priceless jewel stolen from the hotel-room of an Italian nobleman.
Want to Know More?
There are many excellent videos on YouTube about pearls and oysters, some which I found particularly interesting, were…
When it comes to collecting, buying or selling antiques – one of the hardest things to shift – either towards you, or away from you – are things which come in sets.
Sets are larger, sets cost more, sets have pieces that go missing, sets take up more space, they weigh more, and postage and delivery costs go up as a result. But when you can find a set in great condition, you hold onto it!
This is why antique sets of…anything…are always so hard to find. If you find them, if you can find them, and they’re in fantastic condition, then they have gigantic price-tags. And if you find them, and the price is reasonable, then there’s almost certain to be some kind of strings attached.
This is why I jumped at the chance to secure this beautiful set of matched, antique straight razors, when I saw them for sale online.
Back in the days when the only way to get a decent shave was to master the use of a cutthroat razor, manufacturers went above and beyond to try and make the shaving experience as enjoyable as possible.
One way of doing this was to sell razors in sets – pairs, threes, fours, and if you could afford it, even full, seven-day weeklies. Handsomely presented in wooden boxes with fitted interiors lined in fabric, these sets were designed to entice men to take pride and enjoyment in the art of shaving. They were status-symbols, intended to make you want to use them – to take care of them – and to want to learn how to use them.
Today – such multi-razor sets are prized, and rare, antiques. To find a set in complete and functional condition with minimal wear or damage is becoming increasingly hard, and any such sets usually command high prices. I consider it nothing but great fortune to have landed this deal for under $150.00!
Multi-Razor Sets – Whys and Wherefores?
Multi-razor sets are a strange beast, a curious relic of a bygone age. When’s the last time you went out to buy a new razor, and got told by the salesman at the grooming-supplies store, that you had the option of buying razors in two, three, four, or even seven-piece sets of matching razors?
Never. That’s when. And yet, in an age when one straight razor was just as likely to do as good a job as two, or four, or seven, multi-razor sets were surprisingly common. Sold by department stores, famous manufacturers, and jewelry and luxury-merchandise retailers, sets containing multiple razors were often presented in handsome cases made of wood, covered in leather, swathed in velvet and silk, and with gold-leaf logos and company names stamped on the lids.
But why? Why bother? What’s the point of having more than one razor, when one razor will do just as good a job as two or more?
Multi-razor sets were popular in the Victorian era and the first half of the 20th century, because using a straight razor required considerably more skill than a modern cartridge razor, or even a double-edged safety razor. Straight razors took more skill to strop, and sharpen, and maintain overall. Because of this, having a set of multiple razors allowed you to spread out your shaves across multiple blades, thereby reducing wear on the blades, and by extension, reduce the number of times that it was necessary to sharpen a razor – not a skill that everybody was well-versed in (assuming that they even had the necessary equipment to carry out such a task).
Sharpening razors was done by your local barber, the man who was more likely to know everything about razor maintenance than anybody else in town. To avoid paying for his sharpening services too often, razors were simply rotated and stropped as often as possible, to avoid having to visit the barber. Only when the razors were so blunt that stropping alone wouldn’t return them to full sharpness, would the razors then be touched up again on a razor hone, to bring them up to working condition.
Cased razors require more scrutiny than most, since boxes and storage cases rarely survive intact.
Drawing out the times between sharpening periods was important for another reason, quite apart from cost: Blade wear.
Straight razors have very, very thin blades – thin enough to snap with your bare hands, if you’re not worried about slicing your fingers off, first – and because of this, the edges of the blades can get worn down very easily from excessive or incorrect sharpening. Razors which are over-zealously sharpened can suffer from “smiling” or “frowning”, where the edges (smiling) or the middle (frowning) of the blade-edge are so ground-down by abrasion that the physical blade starts to lose its shape – they aren’t called STRAIGHT razors for nothing, after all – if the blade isn’t straight, it can’t be sharpened. If it can’t be sharpened, it can’t be shaved with – you have a useless blade!
It was to prevent this from happening that people bought multi-razor sets – to cut down on the cost of sharpenings, and also to reduce their frequency to make the blades last as long as possible.
The final reason why multi-razor sets were so popular is because they were considered a status symbol. While anybody could buy two (or more) individual razors, and rotate them day by day or week by week to reduce blade-wear and sharpening, being able to buy a cased, matched set was something that was, in general – on a whole other level. The expense of making a custom case, of lining it in fabric and veneering it in leather, of adding in the fittings that would hold the razors in place, of adding in the hinges, catches, or even locks and keys, all entailed extra time, expense…and therefore – money.
If you were able to afford all that – even for a two-razor set – then it suggested that you were a person of means – a person who could afford a few of the finer things in life – and a person who could justify the expense of buying your own cased set.
Multi-Razor Sets: Buying and How-Tos
As I mentioned before, multi-razor sets don’t really exist these days. A handful of companies still make seven-day luxury sets, but these cost thousands upon thousands of dollars each, and it’s unlikely that most people interested in straight razor shaving would wish to spend that amount of money on such a set, unless it was a real, once-in-a-lifetime splurge.
So if you do want to own such a set, then the only way to get one is either to accumulate the razors yourself, and make the case or box at home (or commission somebody else to make it for you), or to buy one secondhand.
Let’s assume that you want to, and you do. What sorts of things do you need to be aware of?
I already covered most of the details about buying vintage or secondhand razors in my previous posting on razors (see “The Idiot’s Guide to Straight Razor Shaving” that I wrote a few weeks ago), so in this part of the posting, I’ll be discussing other things to keep an eye out for, besides the razors themselves.
Checking the Razors
The first thing you want to do is to check the razors themselves. Now I already covered most of this previously (see the link, above), so I won’t go into it in amazing detail – but suffice to say – you want to be sure that all the razors in the set are identical, and that they are all in functional condition, or can be restored to functional condition.
Blades should be clean, undamaged, and without heavy rusting.
This is one of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to buying antique razor sets like this – all it takes is one TINY blemish – one crack, one chip, or one set of broken scales – to completely ruin an otherwise pristine set. Once one of those razors is damaged and can’t be repaired, the set loses all its value! Nobody will want it because they can’t use it as intended, and because of that, regardless of how cheap the set is, it’s pointless trying to buy it.
This isn’t something that you want to find out AFTER you’ve bought a set, so make sure you check every single razor with microscopic precision, before dropping any money. Light surface-rust and minor scuffs and damage can be repaired, but major issues like cracked, split or chipped blades, heavy rust that goes deep into the steel, or major damage to the box are all things which are irreparable – the set is now worthless. Don’t buy one of those.
Checking the Box
Assuming that the razors are matched, and functional, without major defects, the next thing to examine is the box, or case which the razors come in. Check for any cracks, major blemishes, broken hinges, broken locks or clasps, damaged fittings, excessive wear or rubbing, split leather, major stains or other damage to the interior linings.
Some of these things can be repaired. Missing keys can be found, or re-cut. Hinges can be tightened and you can find new screws for that. Depending on how original you want the box to be, new fabric for lining the interiors can also be sourced (at the sacrifice of any gold-leaf printing inside the lid), and wooden surfaces can be sanded and re-stained to bring back the shine in the wood.
Brass or other metal fittings such as escutcheons, hinges, lock-plates etc, can be polished or replaced. The leather surfacing can be re-polished with an appropriate leather-polishing wax or stain, and gold edging can be retouched to an extent, with things like gold paint of the right hue (or if you really want to do it properly, you can get actual gold-leaf and do it that way).
A clean, unblemished interior.
While examining any prospective purchase, you need to decide just how much imperfection you’re prepared to tolerate, or how far your repair and restoration skills will stretch. The more you’re willing to compromise, the more sets will become available to you. Finding perfect or near-perfect sets for reasonable prices is very difficult – they’re getting increasingly rare, and the sets which are leftover are often more trouble to restore than they’re worth.
So, What about This Set, Then?
Isn’t it neat?? I picked this up on eBay about a month ago (what with our friend Coronavirus staying around for the foreseeable future, the parcel took forever to get here), and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to add to my collection: An antique, cased pair of matching straight razors!
What is it all Made Of?
This particular set features a wooden case or box, lined with red leather on the outside, bordered in gold leaf, with an interior of blue silk and velvet. The lid also features a nickel silver cartouche in the middle, where the owner’s initials or a date or some-such thing, could be engraved, if desired – a feature which bespeaks the set’s intended role as a gift, or as a significant purchase.
The razors themselves are made of carbon steel, with the original owner’s initials engraved on the blades, and which possess scales made of celluloid plastic. The original eBay listing identified them as bone, but a close look reveals the faux-ivory ‘grain’ pattern, that is so common to so many early celluloid-scaled razors.
Restorations and Repairs
The set didn’t really need much work, once I’d gotten my hands on it – one of the main reasons I bought it. Apart from some polish to hide some marks and bring a bit of colour back to the leather, a bit of metal polishing to the hardware, checking the razors for rust, and then giving them a thorough sharpening, there really wasn’t much to do.
Restoring the finish was largely a matter of rubbing red leather polish in, to bring back the original colour and restore any fading or colour-loss.
All in all, the set was in excellent condition, barring some minor touch-ups, cleaning and general maintenance. A worthwhile purchase which will only ever increase in value.
If ever two words were more opposite to each other, I don’t think you could find a pair more perfect than ‘toothpick’…and…’luxury’.
But here we are.
I have dared to put these two into the same sentence, and it has been done.
Toothpicks have been used for thousands of years for cleaning teeth, picking out stuck food, gunk, grime, or for scraping away at the enamel surfacing to remove hardened plaque or other detritus. In an age before particularly sophisticated (or comfortable) dental care was available, keeping one’s teeth clean with a toothpick was one of the most important things ever! Abscesses, receding, or inflamed guns, and the sheer discomfort of stuck food or tooth decay, were big motivators for keeping one’s mouth (and teeth) as clean as possible at all times.
Precious Metal Toothpicks
Toothpicks made out of metal have been in use for centuries, and ranged from simple copper, bronze or brass ones, to expensive luxury models, such as those made from silver, or from (usually low karat) solid gold. In an age when plentiful food and good nutrition was much rarer than it is nowadays, using a silver or gold toothpick to clean your mouth after a meal was a sign of wealth and extravagance – the fact that you needed to use such a thing indicated wealth, and the fact that it was made of silver or gold only enforced this fact to anybody watching.
Precious metal toothpicks in gold or silver were common in many cultures around the world, and examples have been found which were made in the United Kingdom, Australia, and several countries in Asia, where using toothpicks is much more common overall, than it tends to be in European countries.
In both Europe, and Asia, silver and gold toothpicks were a common accessory. Usually, such toothpicks were housed in cylindrical metal storage tubes, and could be slid in or out upon the demand for use. They were usually affixed to the user’s clothing, or hung around the neck, using a chain or necklace, or else clipped to another piece of jewelry – such as on the end of a pocketwatch chain.
Such retractable toothpicks became increasingly popular in the 1700s and 1800s, when grooming and personal presentation were taken very seriously, and when professional dental care left much to be desired. Numerous silversmiths and goldsmiths all over the world made toothpicks for sale the public – usually out of high-grade silver (800, 900 or 925 sterling), or else, out of lower-grade gold (usually 9kt), owing to the soft nature of gold, which had to be heavily alloyed with copper so that it would be strong enough to be made into something as thin and small as a toothpick, without snapping or breaking while being used.
I picked up this particular toothpick at my local flea-market. There wasn’t much information, except a card that said: “STERLING SILVER TOOTHPICK”, and a price ($5.00). I have no idea how old it is, but going by the “STG SIL” mark on the end of the shaft, I’d say that it was Australian-made (STG SIL is a common, generic Australian silver mark, standing for “STERLING SILVER”).
The pick is square cross-sectioned, with a sharp, pyramidal point, a twisted shaft, and a flat, spatula’d end with the fineness punched into it. It’s 2-3/4 inches long, and is by far the smallest antique I have ever purchased!
For the person who has everything – you can still buy sterling silver toothpicks today. They might be the perfect “green” solution for you, if you’re looking for a portable and discrete way to clean your teeth while out and about, and don’t want to use wooden toothpicks, plastic ones, or miles and miles of dental-floss. A number of online retailers sell them and if nothing else, it’ll definitely be a conversation-piece at your next dinner engagement!…but perhaps just display it, rather than demonstrate it!
Aaah, January, 2021! Time for new years’ resolutions, like saving money, earning more, losing weight, eating healthy…yeah, how about we set a more realistic goal? How about we learn about the most cost-effective, money-saving, and coolest way for the average guy to achieve a crisp, clean, comfortable shave?
In this posting, I’ll be going over what I deem to be the ‘Idiots’ guide to straight razor shaving‘ – a posting dedicated to explaining to you how to start on straight razor shaving, and how to get the best results, what to do, what not to do, what to be aware of, and what to avoid. Everything that follows is written on the assumption that you’ve never done this before, but might possibly be thinking of trying to!
Everything written here comes from over 12 years’ personal experience as a straight razor user. All the tips, tricks, advice, and techniques used are ones which I myself have used for over a decade without incident.
So, let’s begin…
What is a Straight Razor?
A straight razor, also known as a straight-edge razor, or more ominously, as a ‘cutthroat’ razor – is a thin, flat, very sharp blade affixed to a pair of scales (what some people call the ‘handle’) by a set of pins and rivets, and which may be sharpened and reused endlessly.
Razors of one kind or another have been around for literally thousands of years, but the conventional cutthroat razor with which most of us might be familiar with today is an invention of the 1600s, when the first such razors were invented in Germany, whereafter, the basic design was spread throughout Europe, being refined and improved as it went.
The Parts of a Straight Razor
So that you know what’s going on, let’s first go over the parts of a straight razor.
First, we have the blade, which is the main metal component. Flat, thin and very sharp. At the top of the blade we have the spine and at the bottom we have the edge.
When purchasing a straight razor, it’s good to know the razor’s size. The size of the razor is determined by the size of the blade, which is traditionally measured from spine to edge in 8ths of an inch. Razors traditionally went from 4/8 (half-inch wide) to 8/8 (one inch wide). Some go wider, some go narrower. Most razors will fall somewhere between 4/8 and 8/8, though.
At the farthest end of the blade, we have the point and at the other end, the tang. To reduce weight and improve the shaving experience, the vast majority of straight razors are hollow-ground, meaning that their blades have a concave cross-section. Grinding out the excess metal makes the blade lighter, easier to sharpen, and easier to use.
The blade is attached to the scales by rivets or pins, and are held in place by collars and washers. Most straight razors have two pins, but some will have three, for extra strength. Scales are made of almost anything you can imagine. In my time, I have seen scales made of horn, ebonite, celluloid, wood, bone, ivory, mother of pearl, and even sterling silver!
The blade’s tang is where you will find the maker’s details. The company that made the razor, and where it was made. You might also find some corrugations on the tang, next to the blade. These are gimps, designed to give you better grip on the steel. Some blades have upper gimps, some have lower gimps…some even have both!
Next to the gimps (if there are any), there are the transverse stabilisers. These are angular grooves or ridges punched into the blade when it was formed. They are designed to act as a finger-guard, but also to stop the blade from cracking from overzealous stropping or sharpening.
At the far end of the scales, away from the tang is the wedge which is used to hold the scales apart, so that the blade can rest between them when it’s not being used.
What are Straight Razors Made Of?
Straight razors are made of a variety of materials. The main components are the scales, the blade, the pins and the washers. Pins and washers used to be made of brass (to prevent rusting), but nowadays, stainless steel is also available. Blades were traditionally made of carbon steel (and most still are). In modern times, some are made of stainless steel.
Assorted antique straight razors with original ivory scales. Due to the expense, razor scales made of ivory were always kept as thin as possible.
Scales, the two straight pieces which house the blade when it isn’t being used, have, as mentioned above, been made out of almost every material imaginable. Razors with rare or expensive scale-materials, such as mother of pearl, ivory, sterling silver and horn, command a premium on the antique market. Most razors these days have scales made of celluloid or some other variety of hard, wear-resistant plastic.
Blade Shapes & Points
Straight razor blades come in a wide variety of shapes and styles. Almost all modern straight razors are what’s called ‘hollow-ground’ – this means that the sides of the blade are ground into a concave shape. This keeps the razor light, but also makes it easier to sharpen and shave with, without all the excess metal on the blade getting in the way.
Razors range from wedge blades (no grinding), near-wedge, quarter-hollow, half-hollow, full-hollow, and extra-hollow. Straight razors with significant hollow-grinding are called ‘singing’ or ‘ringing’ blades, because of the bright metallic ringing sound that’s created when they’re struck, tapped or shaved with. This was meant to be a sign of craftsmanship, because it reflected the quality of the steel used to manufacture the blades.
An ivory-scaled Bengall with a square-point blade, and a worn-out German blade with a barber’s notch in the tip.
Along with grinding, blades also differ in their points – the tip of the blade opposite the heel. Points vary between round, square, French, Spanish, and barber’s notch. The majority of modern razors are round or French-point. Spanish, squared-off and notched points are only ever found on antique blades. Round and French-point blades became the most popular because they came with the lowest risk of accidentally nicking yourself with the tip of the razor while shaving, due to their rounded-off ends.
Straight Razor Accessories
Just like how fuel alone isn’t enough to make a car run (hey, you also need oil, water, air for the tires, and keys to start it, right?), a straight razor on its own is not enough to start shaving. For a traditional, straight razor shave, you will need, at a bare minimum:
A Leather Strop
A strop is the long, flat piece of leather upon which straight razors are ‘stropped’ (more about this later). A good strop should be made of smooth leather, free of blemishes, and at least 2-3 inches wide, and at least 12 inches long. These are easily available from shaving-supplies shops, online, on eBay, or if you’re a leather-worker – heck, you can even make your own, if you want to!
The point of the strop is to realign the very fine edge of the blade, before and after each use of the razor. As straight razors are, quite literally, razor sharp, the blade comes to a very very fine point at the edge – fine enough to be warped and bent by stubble when it’s being used to shave with. Eventually, this edge will become so jagged that it won’t cut anymore. To smooth the edge, stropping is essential.
My restored, 1920s razor strop. The casing is sterling silver.
The strop should be held tightly in one hand, and the blade placed flat down on the strop. You strop spine-first, back and forth, on both sides of the blade, making sure to roll the blade on the SPINE and NOT on the EDGE – otherwise you’ll undo all your hard work and dull the razor all over again. This should be done at least 20 times, covering the full width of the blade, to get the best results.
To avoid flexing the blade, any pressure applied (although this should be minimal) should be applied to the spine of the blade, not the edge – again, to prevent flexing, rolling or curling over the edge. The whole point of stropping is to straighten the edge so you can shave with it again – if you apply pressure to the edge or curl it over, you’ve just undone all your work. Whoops!
The most traditional kind of strop is the ‘hanging strop’ – you know, it hangs on a hook or a ring or nail on your bathroom wall and you just yank it up and out and strop and then drop it back when you’re done. If you don’t want to use that, you can also buy an adjustable ‘paddle strop’, which you hold in one hand and strop with the other. Paddle strops are usually adjustable, so that you can dictate how tight, or loose, you want the leather to be before you start stropping.
Honing Stones
One of the main reasons why I got into straight razor shaving was to have the ability to reuse my razors over and over and over again. Never having to throw them out, never having to buy new ones, and never having to worry about where I’m going to get new blades, or how much they’re going to cost.
To achieve this end – it’s important to know how to sharpen your razors.
I mean, you don’t have to. You can get somebody else to sharpen them for you, but if you can learn this skill yourself, it’s a lot easier, more fun, and saves you money in the long run.
To sharpen your razors, you will need at least two sharpening stones. A coarse or medium-grit one, and a fine-grit one. I use an old medium-grit oilstone, and a 1,200-grit Japanese water-stone for my razors and these work excellently. Whatever you decide to use will be up to you, but make sure that the stones you buy are quality, and meant for sharpening fine-edged knives and razors. Don’t buy one of those cheap knife-sharpener gizmoes at your nearest kitchen-supplies store – you’re wasting your time, and money.
Assuming you have your stones, you can start sharpening. Place the medium-grit stone in its holder or base (or if you don’t have one, then a small, damp towel will do) – this will hold the stone in place, and stop it from sliding around. Spray the top with water, and commence sharpening.
Lay the blade flat down on the stone. Raise the spine slightly, until the blade is at about 10-15 degrees, or less – and draw the razor across the stone, from heel to point, edge-first. Flip over to the other side and draw it back, again, from heel to toe. This is one pass. Repeat at least 20 passes on the medium stone, and then at least another 20 on the fine stone afterwards, to sharpen your razor, and then strop afterwards, to smooth the edge.
If you have trouble with maintaining the slight angle that you need to sharpen your blades, one common trick is to ‘tape’ the spine. Get some masking tape the length of the blade (about three inches), tape it over the spine of your razor, and start sharpening. The tape raises the angle of the spine slightly, and gives you the right angle-of-attack. It also stops the spine from scraping on the stone, and wearing down the metal. Simply peel off the tape once you’re done sharpening.
If you want a slightly higher angle of attack, use two strips of tape instead of one.
If you’re unsure about how many times to strop, or hone your razor-blade – remember: More often is better than not enough. Shaving with a blunt razor is not only incredibly uncomfortable (razor-burn from a blunt straight razor is an absolute pain in the ass) – it is also extremely dangerous (they don’t call them ‘cutthroat’ razors for nothing!).
Bowl, Mug, or Scuttle
Now that you’ve honed, stropped and prepped your blade, the next thing to look at is what you’re going to make your lather in. Traditional wet-shaving always involved hot water, and a good-quality shaving-soap or cream with which to turn into a hot, smooth, sweet-smelling lather.
This is usually done in some type of vessel – either a bowl, a mug, or a scuttle. Bowls are wider and give more range of movement, scuttles and mugs are smaller, and take up less space. Scuttles have the advantage of drainage-holes and lots of hot water to keep things from getting too soggy, but still nice and warm, and mugs have the advantage of being able to hold them in one hand while lathering with your brush with the other.
Which one of these three options you choose is really up to you, and your own personal circumstances. What you’re comfortable with, what you like, what you can afford, and what you think goes best with your other accessories.
A Shaving Brush
The next shaving accessory you’ll need is a traditional shaving brush. In times past, these were usually made from badger-fur, because the bristles of badger-hair retained water and were thick, soft and strong. Some brushes these days are made from synthetic fur, but the best ones are still made from badger.
A shaving scuttle (filled with water) and shaving brush, on the right.
Shaving brushes vary greatly in size, style, knot-size, and the length of the bristles. The type of badger-hair used also plays a part – they can be stiff, medium, or soft. The type of brush you choose is partly up to personal choice, but also what kind of lathering agent you choose to use.
Usually, soft creams work better with soft bristled brushes. Firmer soaps, which need a bit more friction to work a lather with, typically require brushes with stiffer bristles. Brushes range in size from tiny little travel-sized ones, all the way up to larger full-sized brushes which come with their own stands.
An Alum-Block, or Styptic
Hopefully, you’ll never need to use either of these, but they’re good to have around.
Alum blocks and styptic pencils exist to deal with any minor nicks, cuts or razor-burn that you might get from shaving. They help to sterilise the area, close the pores and reduce bleeding. I keep a block of alum on standby, but I’ve hardly ever had to use it. Hopefully, neither will you!
Aftershave Lotion
Aah, aftershave. Refreshing, sweet-smelling, cleansing…I never use it. I’ve never had the need to take my shaving routine that far. I may start using it in the future, but for the time-being…no.
That said, some guys do enjoy the scent and feel of aftershave on their faces after a good, crisp shave. Again, as with soaps vs creams, the aftershave you choose is largely a matter of personal preference.
Back in the Victorian era, aftershaves were developed when it was discovered the alcohol-based lotions could kill the bacteria that would cause infections introduced to the body via razor-cuts during your morning shave. To guard against these possible infections, aftershaves were marketed as the necessary, final step in the perfect shave. To make them sound less medicinal and more sartorial in nature, aftershaves were often scented to act as both a preventative, and also as a cologne.
Preparing to Shave
You have honed and stropped your razor, and have managed not to warp or fold over the edge. Excellent! Now begins the most perilous, or most pleasurable, part of the straight razor experience: Actually shaving with it!
First, you need hot water. Fill up your basin with hot water – as hot as you can comfortably stand. Soak your brush in the water and get it nice and warm, and then fill your scuttle, mug, or bowl with water, to heat it up.
Pour out most of the water from your mug or bowl (but keep as much water as you can, inside your scuttle), and then add in your cream (if you’re using a block of shaving-soap, it should already be inside there. The hot water will melt the soap and cause it to stick to the inside of the scuttle, mug or bowl, and prevent it from sliding around). You don’t need much shaving cream, a fingernail-sized dot will do.
Fish out your brush, shake off the excess water, and start lathering up the cream or soap. A good lather is like egg-whites – thick, fluffy and dense. If it’s all sloppy and wet, you’ve got too much water. If it’s not forming, then your lather is too dry. Adjust the water accordingly. Shaving scuttles have holes drilled into the soap-dish on top, which allows any excess water to drain away into the jug underneath. If you have trouble regulating how much water you need, try using a scuttle – it’ll do the regulating for you, and make things esier!
The water should have warmed up your bowl, mug or scuttle, and your brush, making the lather nice and warm. While it was soaking, you could also use some of the water to moisten and soften your stubble, or you could let the lather do that.
Once you’ve worked up a lather, massage it into your stubble and face using the brush, using circular motions to spread it around evenly. Paint it on smooth once it’s applied, and then you can start shaving.
Proper lathering is essential for a straight razor shave – the blades are designed to glide across a smooth, wet, lubricated surface – trying to shave without at least first wetting your face in hot water – will be a truly unforgettable experience…and not for the reasons that you might like. Without sufficient slickness, the blade will drag, scrape, and even cut you if you’ve not prepared yourself in the correct way.
Shaving with a Straight Razor
Shaving with a straight-edge razor can be unnerving if you’ve never done it before – after all – you’re about to put three inches of lethally sharp steel against your throat with nothing to stop you from reenacting a scene from a certain Stephen Sondheim musical – but provided that your razor is as sharp and smooth as possible, and you’ve prepared your skin properly, there’s really nothing to worry about.
The first thing to do is to get the right grip on the razor. Open it and swing the scales around so that the blade and scales are perpendicular to each other. Grip the blade across the tang, with two fingers on either side of the scales, and using the thumb to hold everything in place.
Rest the blade flat against your skin, and raise up the spine slightly, so that you have an angle of about 20-30 degrees. This is your angle of attack.
Now, using LIGHT, GENTLE, SHORT STROKES – start shaving.
Straight razors are meant to be, quite literally – razor sharp. This means that the razor should be sharp enough to cut through all your stubble without you having to force it, press it, push it, tug it or wrestle with it in any way whatsoever. The correct amount of pressure to use is none at all. The weight of your hand and the razor alone, should be enough to cut through whatever you need to shave off.
If it isn’t – then your razor isn’t sharp enough, or hasn’t been stropped properly. Try sharpening and stropping it again.
If it is, however – then the blade should glide through with no problems. As it cuts, you should feel minimal resistance, and a soft prickly sensation and scraping noise, kind of like buttering toast. The scraping noise is the sound of the blade cutting dozens of tiny hairs all at once.
Stretching the Skin
As you shave, it’s important to stretch your skin, so that your stubble stands up straight, and is therefore easier to cut. You can do this in a number of ways. Moving your jaw, tightening your facial muscles, puffing out your cheeks, or angling your head will all achieve skin-tightening in one way or another. You can also use your non-razor hand to stretch the skin as you go along.
Direction of Growth
It’s important to know, as you shave, the direction of your stubble-growth. This way, you’ll know whether you’re shaving with, against, or across the grain. With the grain means shaving in the same direction as your stubble-growth, across means shaving perpendicular to it, and against, means…against the grain!
However you choose to attack your stubble, it’s important to apply as little pressure as possible, and to use light, short strokes. Cover a couple of square inches at a time. Naturally, shaving is much easier on flat surfaces, so to get the best shave, divide your face up into – and shave primarily on – as flat a series of surfaces or facets as you can find. Manipulate your jawbone as necessary to achieve this.
Shaving in Passes
Thanks to multi-blade cartridge razors and electric shavers, most people these days are used to shaving everything off in the space of a minute, with multiple blades scraping off one’s stubble in an instant…actions which can lead to razor burn, cuts and even ingrown hairs – nasty!
Our grandfathers got around these issues by shaving in passes – doing one full shave with a single blade, lathering up, and then doing another shaving session or ‘pass’, again with a single blade – to catch anything that wasn’t shaved off the first time. In most instances, two or three passes is the norm.
Shaving in this manner is safer, and less irritating to the skin – useful, if you have dry or sensitive skin which doesn’t hold up well to abrasions or excessive friction. Also, since you’re not literally trying to pull your stubble out by the roots, you’ll have fewer instances (if any) of ingrown hairs and reduced chances of razor burn. If you’ve never had razor burn before, count yourself lucky, because it stings like an absolute bitch!
Manipulating the Blade
As you grow more proficient with using a straight-edge razor, you’ll become more adventurous in how you handle it. Eventually, you’ll find out more about exactly what a straight-edge razor can do, and how to hold and direct the razor to achieve the results you want it to.
For example – resting your fingers against, or gripping the spine of the blade will give you a much higher level of control – especially around fiddly areas such as the upper-lip and the side of the mouth – places where long, swift, sweeping strokes aren’t possible. Holding the razor like this also gives you more control in how you shave with the razor – allowing you to do several short, quick strokes to scrape away irritating fuzz, when full single strokes are impractical.
Exactly how adventurous and proficient you get in manipulating your blade to do what you want, is largely up to practice, and learning exactly how your hand and the razor interact with each other. Some movements are easier than others – find the ones that work for you, and practice them when you shave.
Finishing your Shave
Once you’re done getting off as much stubble as you can with your straight razor, wash off the soap and stubble, and then dry off your face – and your razor. The vast majority of straight razors are made of high carbon steel – which is very sharp, but which can also rust very easily – so be sure to keep them dry as much as possible. Ideally, razors should be stored in a cabinet or storage-case, to prevent them from getting damp, and rusting out the blade. Also – make sure you dry out any water between the scales, or else it’ll get on the blade when you close the razor, and start rusting it out even more.
Once you’ve dried your razor, make sure that you strop the razor once more – just a light stropping – that way you won’t have to do it as much the next time you start to shave. Ideally, you should strop at least once with every shave (most people do it twice, just out of habit – at the start, and end of the shave).
And there you have it! A straight razor shave.
Razor Maintenance and Care
Given proper care, a straight razor will literally last for centuries. Every single razor in my collection is an antique from the 1800s, and they’re all in fantastic, usable condition.
To keep your razors in that condition, proper maintenance is essential.
When not in use, razors should be kept dry, and closed.
When sharpening or stropping, light pressure should be applied, with even force across the width of the blade. This prevents wear and tear on the blade-edge, and the spine, ensuring that the blade lasts for as long as possible.
Razors should be sharpened periodically. When you want to do that is up to you. It could be every month, every three months, six months, even once a year. Exactly when you do it is entirely up to your personal circumstances. You’ll know when to sharpen your razor when stropping alone doesn’t get it up to shaving-sharpness anymore.
Buying Antique Straight Razors
One of the great joys of mastering the art of using a straight-edge razor is being able to start a collection of antique razors.
Because straight razors can literally last for centuries, there’s billions of them out there ready to be snapped up for very little money, if you know where and how to look for them.
If buying a brand-new razor – which can cost several hundreds of dollars – doesn’t appeal to you – then you can just as easily buy a vintage razor for a few bucks, learn to sharpen and strop it yourself, and teach yourself how to use it. If you can be proficient with something that cheap, you’ll have no problems learning how to use better-quality razors which would cost many times more.
So, what do you need to know to buy an antique straight razor?
Checking the Blade for Defects
The most important part of the razor is the blade. When examining an antique razor, make sure that the blade does not have any chips, cracks, dents, dings, nicks, or deep rusting. Any one of these defects will render a blade unusable. Do NOT buy a razor with any of these issues – it is not worth your time.
Next, examine the blade for surface rusting. Light surface rusting is very common on antique razors which haven’t been stored properly. With the right rust-removers, polishes and abrasives, these patches of rust may be removed, and the razor rendered serviceable once more. To prevent injury, always polish, sand or buff the blade from spine to edge.
Avoid any blades which are “smiling” or “frowning”. A ‘smiling’ blade is one where the heel and toe of the blade have been worn away, causing the blade to ‘smile’ (have more metal in the middle, than at the extremities). A ‘frowning’ blade is the exact opposite: A blade with plenty of metal at the toe and heel, but less metal in the middle.
Smiling and frowning blades are the result of improper and overzealous sharpening, which has caused the blade to wear down unevenly. This would cause the blade to become harder to sharpen, harder to strop, and of course – harder to shave with. Do not buy any razors with misshapen blades. They’re simply not worth your effort to try and restore.
Check the Scales for Damage
As mentioned earlier, the ‘scales’ are the two flat panels which make up the ‘handle’ of the razor, into which the blade is placed when not in use.
Scales can be made of almost anything. Mother of pearl, ivory, bone, wood, sterling silver, celluloid ebonite, horn, stainless steel…the list is almost endless.
Regardless of what kind of materials the scales are made of, however, an equal amount of attention should be paid to the scales, as to the blade. Check for defects such as chips, cracks or nicks. Some scales made of natural materials (ie – bone, ivory, horn, etc) may have very thin hairline cracks, as a result of their advanced age – provided that these are not compromising their structural integrity, you can generally ignore them, and use the razor anyway. What you don’t want are scales with so much damage that they’re in danger of falling apart.
Cracks are most common around the stress-points. On scales, the stress-points are the holes which were drilled to drive through the rivets that keep the razor together. Minor hairline cracks are rarely an issue – but large cracks that go all the way through should be avoided.
Another issue is to make sure that the scales have not warped. This happens when, due to improper storage, heat, cold, or other factors, the scales have started to misshape, bend or otherwise deform. Do not buy a razor with these defects! Warped scales are a terrible safety hazard. If the blade does not reliably seat itself between the scales every single time you close the razor, if the blade strikes the scales whenever you try and close it – then don’t buy the razor. The last thing you want to do is to break the blade, or even worse – cut yourself, because the scales got in the way of a moving blade.
Prices for old Razors
The prices for old straight razors vary greatly. Anything made in Sheffield or Solingen is generally excellent quality, and well worth whatever you’re comfortable with paying for it. Razors can be picked up for as little as $10-$20 for a bog-standard mass-produced one, up to $50 for razors with more expensive materials for their scales, such as ivory, silver, or mother-of-pearl. On sites like eBay, restored razors sell for between $100-$200 apiece, again depending on age, condition, materials and completeness.
Straight razor sets – and sets do exist – are the cream of the crop when it comes to antique straight razors. Straight razors were most commonly sold in sets of two, three, four, and seven matching razors. While they can all be tricky to find, especially in good condition, for good money, the hardest and most expensive to procure are the complete, seven-day, seven-piece razor sets, which typically come in a wooden, felt and silk-lined case, complete with matching razors with the days of the week engraved along the spines.
My antique seven-day straight razor set. The grey block next to it is my ca. 1900 “Perforated Razor Hone”, which is excellent for freshening up your blades when they’ve gone a bit dull.
Such sets are extremely hard to find, and very expensive. Most sets are incomplete, broken, or irreparable, and prohibitively expensive. This means that sets which are complete can fetch several hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, because of their condition and rarity. Back in the Victorian era, they were considered status symbols, because they suggested that the person who owned them not only had the money to buy one, but also the manservant whose job it was to sharpen and maintain these razors on a regular basis for his employer.
Other Antique Shaving Accessories
Other antique shaving accessories are easily found on eBay, or at flea-markets, antiques shops and fairs with few problems. Check any honing stones for cracks or chips – ignore any which have those – check any strops for damaged leather, and discard any which have cuts, scraps or tears, and make sure that any bowls, scuttles or mugs you buy don’t have any huge cracks in them. You should always buy your brush brand-new, however. Last thing you want to think about is what kind of gunk might be hiding inside the knot of your brush…
Old lathering mugs and scuttles are cheap and easy to find in good condition. Old strops are a bit harder, but if you’re persistent, you can find them. Or, as I said earlier – if you’re good with leather-crafting, you can even make your own. The perforated razor hone (see photograph above) was all of $20.00 and it’ll last forever!
Concluding Remarks
Straight razors have been used for hundreds and hundreds of years. Variations of the straight razor have existed since antiquity. The straight razor’s ability to give clean, fast, thorough shaves, to cut through entire beards, if need be, and to shave off more in one go than almost any other shaving device, is what has kept it in its position as being the most highly regarded of all the shaving methods developed and invented throughout history.
The fact that shaving with a straight edge requires skill, practice, judgement and a certain amount of bravery, is what makes it appeal to guys, who feel like they might have something to prove – or who want to try and master a new skill – because not just anybody has the courage, patience, or can master the techniques required to shave effectively with a three-inch long open blade at the drop of a hat.
Mastering the use of a straight razor is one of the greatest accomplishments you can achieve, and once reached, is an achievement which nobody can take from you, and which you can use for the rest of your life.
And you can brag about it to your friends, which is pretty cool…!!
Back when straight razors were still the predominant method for carrying out the daily shave, a wide variety of accessories and nicknacks were invented to go along with them.
Just like how nowadays you have suction-cup stands for your smartphones, or bendy-bendy-all-adjustable tripods and selfie-sticks for all your photographic social-media needs, or how companies are now trying to sell you all kinds of groomers, trimmers and motorised hedgeclippers to trim literally every part of your body that you can reach (and even some which you probably can’t!), back at the turn of the 20th century, all kinds of manufacturers were cranking out an equally wide variety of gizmos that claimed to make your grooming routine oh-so-much-easier!
From specialist sharpening stones to razor-kits, reusable blades and shaving sticks, all kinds of accessories were available from any number of magazines, catalogs and specialist suppliers. One of the most common accessories – especially popular among the well-groomed traveling gentlemen of the world – was the retractable razor strop.
Strops – the long, wide strips of leather used to smooth off and realign the edges of the blades on cutthroat razors – had to be as smooth and as flat as possible. Folding, bending or creasing the strop in any way while traveling would cause excessive wrinkles, kinks or deformity to the leather, which would render it useless as a strop. Because strops had to be kept smooth and flat, they could take up a lot of space when traveling. However – there was nothing against rolling up a strop – simply rolling a strop up wouldn’t cause creases or fold-lines that a razor-blade could trip over – which made it the ideal way to package a strop small enough to the portable, without compromising its structural integrity.
The only thing was – there had to be a way to easily roll and unroll the strop each time it was used. In the end, a simple coiled-spring retractable mechanism was created, and housed inside a metal barrel or casing. One end of the strop was attached to the spring-barrel inside the casing, and the other end of the strop trailed out of the mouth of the casing. The remaining leather was coiled up inside the casing, and wrapped around the barrel. Pulling the strop out for use would cause the spring inside the casing to tighten up, and letting go of the strop would make the spring relax, spinning backwards and pulling the strop back inside the storage case.
Simple, and effective.
So effective that several of these retractable strops were manufactured and sold to the public! What had once been a strip of leather over a foot in length and two to three inches in width, was now little more than a rolled-up leather strap, tucked into a metal casing smaller than a soda-can! So simple, so robust, and so convenient!
The majority of these retractable razor strops were housed in cases made of nickel-silver, or silver-plated pewter, or some other variety of cheap, white metal, presumably to keep costs down. The one which I bought online differs from all these greatly, in that the outer casing is made entirely of sterling silver – and has all the hallmarks to prove it!
I have seen several of the silver-plated ones, but never one which was made of solid sterling silver before. After winning it at auction
Pulling Apart the Strop
The original leather that comprised the main component of the strop was completely un-salvageable. It was dry, cracked, torn, brittle and covered in grime. No amount of beeswax and polishing was ever going to restore it.
The first step was to remove this. To do that, I unscrewed the strop-casing, starting with the large bolt that goes right through the body of the casing. After unscrewing it, I pulled it out, and broke the casing open into its three main components: The barrel, and the two end-discs.
Inside the barrel was the strop, and the winding cylinder, all held together by two end-caps.
The strop with the new leather.
I pulled these out and then removed the spring that activated the recoil-mechanism. The final step was to remove the actual leather from inside the cylinder. The leather is simply held in place by friction, and three triangular claws that hold the leather in place. I ended up just cutting the leather out using my pocketknife and pulling it out with tweezers.
I used the original leather as a template, from which to cut a strip of fresh leather of the same dimensions, from some scrap leather of the same thickness and similar finish.
The next step was to fit this into the winding cylinder, and fit the three claws in place, to stop the leather sliding out. After that, the spring was put back inside, the end-caps slid on, and then the leather was simply rolled up around the cylinder.
After that, the cylinder, spring and leather were dropped into the barrel, and the end-discs were fitted back on. I fed some of the leather out of the mouth of the barrel, and then started screwing the bolt back on. This proved to be surprisingly tricky and took a few tries to get right – but the threads finally meshed and the whole thing was screwed back together.
The final step was to cut and sew a new pull-strap to put onto the end of the strop, polish up the metal to remove the worst of the tarnish, and then hang it up in my bathroom. All done!
The hallmarks on the silver casing reveal that the strop was made in Birmingham, in 1924. For something that’s nearly 100 years old, it works surprisingly well!
The spring is perhaps not as elastic as it once was, but the results speak for themselves…
