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HomeAwayFromHone @sub.wetshaving.social
Posts 7
Comments 60
[Mail Call] Ed Wüsthof 220 Barber's King
  • This seems like a really nice size, good compromise between heft/lather handling and agility. Plus I like the jimping on it. Somehow I suspect you'll hang on to this one.

    And ya, wow, did you stumble onto a hidden cache of underappreciated and underpriced blades or did you set out to expand your collection like this?

  • Any durable double edged razors at the sub £50 mark?
  • You might also consider vintage razors, a lot of them are brass and they've stood the test of time to get this far.

    Alternatively, if what you really want is machined stainless you can probably get it for that price from dscosmetic or yaqi on AliExpress. They have many models so it'd be worth searching out some reviews.

  • Weekend Off-topic thread
  • I'm unsurprised to see an overlap between meditation and straight razor appreciation. After all, using, honing and stropping my straights are some of my favourite meditations though I still try to keep a more formal practice.

  • Mailcall
  • There are also thick framebacks but they're basically just like a light wedge so I think you're right to prioritise the Japanese ones.

    I like the look of tapered blades and was lucky enough to score one but it's been at my brother's place waiting for scales for a while now. One day.

    Rattlers are neat but also basically feel like a light wedge however I have this one smaller one I quite like, took a nice edge, slight smile, etc. sometimes a razor just fits.

    "Lancet" is what Mappin called these, but there have been a few imitators and while I've not tried one quite like that though I have this one with a hollowed out spine that maybe is at least in the same sort of category? Heh, actually that mailcall is pretty topical overall, even has a lather catcher.

    Yes, but I have 100 FHS-10 blades and no other razor to use them in😅

    Good call on the Audiostrop then, much more appealing than the Oneblade (which I never really felt drawn to in any way) and I liked the noisy feedback from it though I did move mine along as I could get a similar effect from the Wilkinson.

    Edit: closing a stray image search tab I spotted this link to an especially nice lancet-ish razor.

  • Mailcall
  • For frameback be sure to try one of the thin Japanese ones, they're almost like a stiff hollow and kind of sing. Hm, others... have you tried a lancet blade? Sheffield with a rattler grind? With a taper? Oh! What about the Wilkinson Pall Mall / Dunhill? It takes (quarter hollow) wedge blades but can use Gem too. Not only does it have a roller guard but you can adjust the exposure. Neat thing.

    Speaking of Gem blades, you know you can pull the spine off a Gem and use it in that Autostrop right?

  • How hordes grown – or how I learned to love Acquisition Disorder
  • Thanks for sharing! I must admit, I was slow to come around to this way of thinking, one soap (Williams), one brush (house brand badger), one razor (Merkur 38c) for years but then I tried a straight razor and that all went out the window so on top of the comprehensive arsenal of straights I have a whole spectrum of soap, various DE new and old (even a few vintage blades), Gem razors, injectors (the twin blades from Japan are amazing), a lather catcher, Rolls, and a Wilkinson Dunhill where I hone the blades (pretty much the same as the Pall Mall). And today I tried this new giant tub of unscented soap I bought for some bizarre reason.

    Very glad for the chill low key hobby, I think my favourite part is the utter lack of urgency, and as a bonus my kitchen knives have never been this well maintained. Plus theoretically I can recoup most of the (not life changing) money if I ever have need of it and the stuff is small, it'd all fit in an unremarkable box so I don't really see any downside.

  • Thursday SOTD Thread - October 26, 2023
    • Razor: Weck Sextoblade
    • Blade: Kismet (2)
    • Brush: Mühle 23mm STF
    • Lather: Canada Shaving Soap
    • Post: Thayers

    My one-pass few-variables shaves continue. Kismet blades are nice, this went better but maybe it was the soap--my Canadian MdC tribute showed up quickly (snagged one of the last two they had at amazon) and wow, the tub was so full it didn't quite close. Needed to add water as I unexpectedly loaded a sizable amount of soap, I think I expected it to load slower being so hard. Very slick, and very unscented unlike MWF which I find stronger than I expected (though unobjectionable).

  • Tuesday SOTD Thread - October 24, 2023
  • Sorry, I just peeked at the config options and have never run any of this so no idea about the interaction with Lemmy or how to troubleshoot that. What I'd do though is spin up a toy instance on another subdomain/locally in a container and try to reproduce it there. Maybe with a copy of the data from production if that's easy enough to pull off.

    But ya only in retrospect - I wouldn't have expected changing the banner or icon to be a risky operation.

  • Tuesday SOTD Thread - October 24, 2023
  • Just poked around because I was curious, it does look like the config for pict-rs lets you specify a format to convert things to and a max size/quality: https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/src/branch/main/pict-rs.toml#L237

    I'd suggest WebP with a quality of 85 and max dimensions of 3840x3840 (because 4k is 3840x2160).

    That takes djundjila's photo for today (a 4236x2677 jpeg) from 1.9Mb down to 360Kb for a 3840x2427 WebP.

    You might also consider AVIF as that's widely supported as well and looking like it'll probably become the new standard but for now is a bit CPU intensive until CPUs start adding SIMD for it. Too bad JPEGXL lost momentum, it was kinda better (and less CPU intensive). But if the server doesn't mind chewing on it ...that same SotD as a quality 66 AVIF is just 160Kb, eg. less than a tenth the size.

    For more info about quality settings: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/avif-webp-quality-settings/

  • Tuesday SOTD Thread - October 24, 2023
  • Thanks for your efforts and yay, that works here too! I can paste them even. Nice. Interestingly, I copied a JPG by right clicking in Firefox and it wound up as a PNG when I pasted that. But maybe that's the browser? Still, it'd be neat if the site converts to something more efficient like WebP and maybe caps the res at 4k ...though maybe storage is cheap enough at this point that we could each put a full res SotD from our phones for the next decade without really being a burden? ...and now I wonder if the transcoding can be done client side via wasm or something. Yawn, I should sleep, rambling.

    Oh! One thing though: earlier I tried pasting my SotD to another Lemmy instance to see if that works and it did fine. I didn't post it and cancelled the preview. However the image stuck around. Wondered if and how those get mopped up, maybe a cron job? It seems to be there still some hours later, might check tomorrow just out of curiosity.

    (heh I think you restarted while I was trying to post this so will also be interesting if the image persists, though presumably shouldn't be orphaned now that it's referenced in a comment?)

  • Tuesday SOTD Thread - October 24, 2023
    • Razor: Kai Excelia
    • Blade: Kai Mild (4)
    • Brush: Omega 10015 22mm boar
    • Lather: Mitchell's Wool Fat (tallow)
    • Post: aloe

    Been messing around with some honing experiments on troublesome razors and wanted to give my face a break so last shave I used my Fili as that's usually a nice vacation. It was almost but I'm not sure if it was the state of my face, not having used that blade in a while or maybe I really do have a bit of a reaction to Darkfall so I figured let's eliminate some variables and find out about the soap, I'd been meaning to get to know this new Kismet blade a bit better and compare to AC so I'm going to stick to unscentedish soaps and one pass shavette shaves with quality blades for a bit. That's almost a theme thingy, One'n'done'tober 11vember ...something. But I'm not quite that organised and will start messing with it soon enough by seeing how Darkfall goes once I do a few of these then maybe digging out some paste edges to compare to the shavettes.

    I like Kai AC blades. This was nice, been a while. Feels a bit sharper than the Kismet yet less stressful as this setup seems less pointy (even though the corners are muted on the Kismet) plus the extra weight lends stability. I guess AC is the wedge shavette and Weck the hollow.

    Oh, and this inspired me to order the Canada Shaving Soap I'd been vaguely interested in for a while (as it's rumoured to be comparable to MdC). So far I'd resisted as why would I use that much unscented? But it does have a place and maybe it's SV-ish too, was really enjoying SV lately so here's hoping. Looks promising anyhow: https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/canada-shaving-soap-review.614669/

    https://i.imgur.com/joMktr1.jpg

  • A video of Ern's "Hexe" machine to grind both sides of a razor
  • Ha ya, how did we manage? Especially amazing is pre-integrated-circuits, I fear few in the future will look back and marvel at the crazy machines that mixed analog electronics with clockwork, vacuum, pneumatic, hydraulic. Yet somehow it worked and there were cameras and airplanes!? Hopefully we left docs somewhere in case of EMP or w/e and we need to rediscover that stuff in a hurry...

  • Tuesday SOTD Thread - October 24, 2023
  • Side note: Uploading pictures is so much faster since the migration. It’s almost like having pictures didn’t have to be a PITA 🤔

    Heh, welllll.... I just tried to upload one. I get an HTTP 400 from the post to the /pictrs/image endpoint and the response body is Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out. I thought maybe because I was pasting a largish image so I tried a 350kb or so JPG and clicked the upload button ...nope, same deal. Oh, and the UI tries to parse the body of the error response as JSON so it pops up a red box with SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data.

  • A video of Ern's "Hexe" machine to grind both sides of a razor
  • Sort of. I think the initial shaping is done before the steel is hardened and this looks like the final grinding that happens after that but before the the edge is honed. And it all sort of has to do with honing the edge as you'd have to remove waaaay more metal on the stones if there was no hollowing done, even a near wedge has a bit.

  • A video of Ern's "Hexe" machine to grind both sides of a razor

    I was chatting with someone about Ern razors and mentioned seeing that he'd invented a better way to do hollow grinds. Found the link I remembered (Carl Friedrich Ern & family introduced the "Hexe" machine in 1893) but learned something new when I thought to look for one on Youtube: a current artisan (Ertan Süer) has acquired such a machine and is using it for some of his current production.

    6

    Standardized Textbook of Barbering

    A lot of the books on straight razors are well out of copyright. However, copyright does go back an absurdly long way and covers even the 1950s when they were still in relatively common use. The Internet Archive lends use of books based on how many they physically have in some warehousing arrangement and so you can borrow this one by the hour.

    This seems like it was is in common use training barbers (and may still be -- there seems to be an edition still in print) and being towards the tail end of when straights were prevalent offers a different perspective from the older works.

    2

    Honing tutorial by a kamisori maker

    Ran into this by chance, pretty interesting: I was a little surprised both by the circles and the 1:1 ratio between omote/ura. Also interesting is how he uses a diamond pasted strop seemingly not to refine the edge but more just to deburr it.

    4

    I wish I tried straights sooner, they really got me into shaving. But especially into having more straight razors:

    I think two straights is quite justifiable, you might use up an edge and need to shave before you have time to hone. And two identical ones is a good way to compare hones--same razor, different edge. I have a pair I use like that.

    More? Well, you'll find there is quite a big difference in how a wedge shaves from how a hollow shaves. And there are many grinds in between. Plus there are framebacks! Some framebacks are thin like a hollow but don't quite have the same flex, others shave pretty much like a wedge. Not to mention interestingly shaped tapered blades, lancets, monkey tails...

    And maybe you have a 6/8 and wonder how an 4/8 or 8/8+ width would be? They're certainly going to be different and it's very subjective which is better! But then maybe you like a wide hollow and a narrow wedge? The reverse? Only one way to tell...

    Perhaps you wonder how American, English, French, Swedish, German and Japanese razors differ? I sure did...

    Maybe you were curious what they were like in the 1920s vs. the 1960s. Or the 1800s. Or the 1700s.

    Or you'd like scales made from bone or ivory or tortoise or mother-of-pearl? Or something cool etched on the blade? Or a modern custom from Koraat or HG or Artrazor or Gipson or Ali's Blade or any of hundreds of worthy artisans keeping this craft going?

    I've always been a minimalist. I've never felt the appeal of collecting anything. It started out as trying to find which one works best for me so I could get a really good one of those, but I kinda liked them all. I ...think I collect straight razors now? It just sorta happened 🤷‍♂️

    0

    (sub) domain name

    With the Lemmy instance seeming like it's perhaps getting more uptake than Mastodon is there a chance that if that continues it might one day become the top level wetshaving.social or is it doomed to always be sub.wetshaving.social 'cause it's perhaps really fiddly to change domains around once entrenched?

    0

    How bad is pitting really?

    So, typically, I try to hone through any pitting to get a clean edge. I might tolerate some on the bevel, but not right near the edge where the stresses of shaving and stropping might cause it to collapse and break that nice clean line.

    However...

    I have this one razor. I used it today. I quite like it: it has very little wear and was well ground so it has a very thin bevel. It shaves well and it holds an edge. Indeed, it's one of the few edges I've put a dozen shaves on. But I have a confession: I left a tiny pit at the edge. Because there was probably going to be another and another and... well, usually I'd just take some metal off until we were in reasonable steel. I didn't want to this time, so I left all this (which you can only see at all on one side):

    !

    ...and while I had a mostly clean edge, it did have a small pit at the edge. But nothing major, it's not a serrated knife or anything. So I went with it to see what happened. Every shave I made a point to see if the heel was giving me more irritation than elsewhere on the blade or anything like that and ...nah. It's fine.

    Which reminded me of this post at Science of Sharp where you can see, based on the scale, how very much bigger a hair is than a razor edge. And I think my skin is at least as thick as a hair or I'd be bleeding way more often. A quick search confirms even the thinnest skin (eyelids apparently) has something like 50 microns of epidermis.

    So maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that I can't notice a difference from some tiny pit on the edge? Maybe I should more often err on the side of leaving steel on a nice blade even if it's not so great?

    0

    A treatise on razors: in which the weight, shape, and temper of a razor, the means of keeping it in order, and the manner of using it, are particularly considered

    0