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Thursday SOTD Thread - Sep 28, 2023
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Otto go Hone
I followed @gcgallant@sub.wetshaving.social's foot steps and used my Bismarck with SV soap today, but I left out the most important step of his: refreshing the edge. To my big surprise, the edge has not magically improved since my last shave with it and I had passable, if slightly tuggy shave. The Iron Chancellor needs to go on the hone before his next sortie. At least I didn't have any reason to make "Blood and Iron" puns.
I wonder about the branding of this razor. Really the only famous Bismarcks I know of are the Iron Chancellor, who is one of the main (if inadvertent) architects of WW1, and the (Nazi) battleship of the Kriegsmarine named after him. Neither of these two are great reasons to name a product after, IMO.
70^th^++;
The Iron Chancellor has been amazing once it decided to take a good edge. I’ve wondered about the name too, however, I’m loving the shave from this razor. Very close to a Fili 14.
Oh damn, that's very high praise. I'm .... skeptical 🧐
I've spent a bit of my lunch break honing mine, let's see whether I can get it into a similarly praiseworthy state 🙂
I understand completely! Back in April, I managed to get a 250nm nanocloth edge on the Bismarck. I did this by refreshing the edge using softer, less abrasive water stones from my collection, adding more edge trailing strokes, and stropping between the 8K and 12K, between the 12K and 250nm, and after the 250nm. I did not expect much, but I was stunned by how good this edge was, and how amazing the razor shaved. I decided that the slurry from the softer stones was a key factor in the result I achieved. Since then, I have been playing with using slurry to dampen forces and provide more gentle abrasion at the edge. This seems to have worked wonders on all edges that I have produced. I've spent a lot of time doing sharpness tests and microscope analysis to help verify overall improvement. The only time I don't use slurry now is on final polishing on very hard stones (e.g. Black Arkansas, Jnats, etc.), and I have a ways to go to learn how far I can push an edge on these types of stones.
The edge on my Bismarck now, is a Jnat edge from a new stone that I received in August. Perhaps if I compared the previous synthetic edge to the new one I could tell a difference, but really, I can't. Once you get a fine edge on this razor it transforms from "meh" to amazing.
See, I was happily using my single Naniwa 10'000/3'000 combination stone and a lapping plate, and now this puts me in danger of falling into a natural stone rabbit hole 😅
I'll see how well my synth refresh or the edge worked, first 😀
My hunch is that a truly well-formed edge feels and cuts the same way regardless of the stone combination used. At the end of the day we're shaping metal using abrasion. Whether you use a synthetic material or a natural material to do this, the objective is the same. As you know, I test for sharpness and I use very high magnification to assess edge quality. When there is similarity in these results, the difference in edge feel using different stones (for me) is very small.
This is also the guy who more or less singlehandedly achieved German unification (before Helmut Kohl 🤔). AYLM has Garibaldi, so let's give DOVO Bismarck.
It was originally a brand of its own, and predated WWI. Dovo bought the trademark in the 50s, so presumably it was named after the Otto Von Bismarck. I did however always think Bismarck was also a title or honorific of some nature also, but this may be my mistake.
Regardless, I need to buy myself one just to have in the rotation just like having a Friodur and a W&B wedge is required for any collector
That sounds right, and I found a source for the founding date: 1892, two years after Bismarck retired as chancellor
The family name of the maker was Müller, not Bismarck, and at that point in time, everyone would have thought of the chancellor when reading the name.
I know that predicament 😅