Thread: New study may lead to better blade steel...

The videos clips are astounding.

Chris, thanks for referring to this article for me - I've actually gotten told of it twice (someone I haven't talked to in years emailed me and said "this is right down your alley!!").

I know a fair amount about the way the new razor blades are made vs. the old, but I don't know all of the particulars (exactly what steel, etc).

What these guys have found out is what we know with straight razors. The tips of the blades dent and deflect like a chisel does. I have heard various excuses as to why straight razor blade life is short if the razor isn't taken care of properly (abrasion from dirt on face, etc), but none of these could be correct because even if you clean your face and shave after a shower, edge life without care is short.

The other thing we know with straight razors (at least those of us who are negative and critical like me) is that:
1) we aren't going to get any chromium coatings because honing, linen and stropping wouldn't work with those
2) that means we're left with material, angle and hardness. Razors are all in a pretty narrow angle range. If you get one with a short blade height and a fat spine, you can tell it's more blunt. If you get one with too thin of a spine, it'll dent too easily. If the material becomes less than ideal then proper care and good edge holding through a shave isn't right

Hardness has to be hard enough to not deflect and not so hard that a blade edge chips easily. straight razors also have to be able to stand up to a strop and linen (the linen for razors is more like fire hose - pardon if you've already used these and I'm telling you things you know).

it puts a.....wait for it...

....tiny little area of rounding and wear on the edge of a razor so that the initial edge doesn't deflect.

It's interesting that they mention homogeneity of razors, too, as one thing I've mentioned before (including shaving forums where people are paying big money for O1 razors) is that O1 doesn't make a very good razor. This usually pisses people off. It doesn't work well, though. The steel has to be even more plain - perhaps with only a tiny bit of nickel (silver steel is a common term for the type of drill rod that was used for most). Various innovations over the years were brought to razors (steel with tungsten added, friodur stainless (which is cryo hardened to improve uniformity of the carbides), etc, but none of them ever match the plainest steels you can find hardened in the middle of the tempering range for straight razors.

So what they're looking for is a coated blade that has the finest purest high carbon steel below the coating, but that presents a problem - high carbon steel is poorly behaved in a quench and warps.

Could they possibly improve a blade by making a tiny tiny rounded profile? That would be like what we have on a straight razor. Probably. wood it be worthwhile? I don't know - first, I don't know if they could get it right to please everyone, and second, what would the reward be for making blades that last two or three times as long? Less revenue.

But razors are more like thin knives or chisels than they are like plane blades or thicker knives that do slicing work without deflection.

I've got the answer for razor life for anyone who wants to get off the wagon of blades, though. Two straight razors. You probably only ever need one - for an entire lifetime of shaving. The strop and linen should also last an entire lifetime and we won't get into sharpening, but you don't even need the finest stone available if the skill of honing but not removing the entire edge is learned (the linen and leather maintain a tip that never really needs to be removed - the shoulder behind it needs to be thin....at any rate, since the edge is thin and fragile, you need a second razor in case you sneeze and bump your razor on something or drop it, or accidentally bump a razor into a sink.

..wait for it, like the unicorn method that I proposed where the chisel tip is dealt with and then the bevel behind it is thinned to keep the chisel from feeling blunt and adding cut resistance.

Some of these things start to all look the same!!

The video of the hair cutting is fabulous, though. I've never seen anything like it. When a straight razor starts to get dull and not cut close (Which should never happen), or when it's not quite sharpened fully enough, instead of the edge catching cleanly and severing across or at a shorter diagonal, the edge catches in the hair a little bit but then relies on the hair being pushed against the skin to kind of peel the rest of it off.

Oh, the other trouble with the plainest of steels is that they rust. Carpenter XHP is the finest grain stainless that I've used that gets into razor and tool hardness, and it's slick feeling because it has a lot of chromium, but I don't think the edge will stand up to stropping (which is where O1 also starts to have problems - right at the strop and linen - the edge comes apart a little bit with that).

The biggest marketing opportunity I see in their study isn't the ability to come up with a perfect razor blade. They're leaning toward the highest quality high carbon steels that are as plain as they can be and those generally aren't used in much these days because of warping and defects. The cutler who sits after the heat treat making straight razors is someone with a lifetime skill - to be able to tap the warp out of the razors before they've lost malleability from heat treatment (once they are completely cooled, any such tapping will break them like glass - saw files are similarly straightened before they lose that malleability, their teeth also do well when made of super plain steel. At any rate, to have the skill that cutlers do takes (According to dovo) some number of decades to really get good at. From what I can tell, the rod that dovo uses now to compensate for it is something less plain (more like what we'd call "Chrome vanadium rod", which is actually a fairly plain steel in most cases -I think that rod they've chosen is used because it has better behavior with less warpage - but that gives up something at the edge of the razor).

Failed to mention the marketing opportunity. Like Leonard Lee says, people want to specify certain things. They used to call and talk about this or that thousandth and he didn't believe that most had a clue of what they were talking about, but instead of arguing with them, he catered to them.

There's an opportunity here for someone to vary the angles of razors slightly, brand them and label them. "super keen", to "super tough". The range would probably only be about 3 degrees at the edge.

typical educated maintenance for a good straight razor is linen and leather for most of a year (a good razor will provide a full year of shaves or so) and then perhaps 5 minutes of shaving.

If one ever travels to a razor forum and looks at the honing part of the forum.....geez.

There are people honing razors once a week and going through complicated processes with waterstones (which are OK for razor sharpening, but they blast off the edge that's established).

Once in a while, someone in the background will say "I've been using the same razor, stone and strop for 40 years, and I hone about twice a year". They're written off as being confused.

I'd have loved for these guys at MIT to have called me ahead of time, but how would they know I was such a perv for what's going on at the edge of tools? I'd keep pointing them back to the cleanest and plainest carbon steel to make a better blade, and I don't think they'd like that because they'd find in their studies that even if it's coated, it'll be poorly behaved and have a lot of manufacturing defects.

There's probably a reason why the industry itself got to where it is with the way they do things. Slightly softer core for toughness, and then chromium coatings for slickness and a good keen initial edge.

(knowing how damage occurs on straight razors after looking under a metallurgical scope, it also makes me skeptical when people mention using the same razor for some period of months just by dipping it in oil. What they are likely doing is getting used to a dull razor and living with it. Once a razor is to a certain point of dullness, it stays there. I used to do that without the oil because of bad razor burn - let a razor get dull and then use it more with a scrubbing motion in the shower. You can use a dull razor for a couple of months like that.

Once I got a straight razor and learned to take good care of it, shaving with anything else was over quickly, though. It's like having a blade razor that's been used for two days except it's like that every single day, and things like razor burn or clogged tips, etc, or too much hair to get through the razor easily if you take a few days off - those are long gone.