Prosthetic Conscience

“New” razors from Father-in-law

This past weekend we happened to be in Oak Ridge for a while, because we were in the region for an unfortunate reason that I’m not going to talk about here. Carol was very kind to give me a couple of razors that Bill no longer uses. One was a 1960 Gillette adjustable (“Fatboy”), and one was a 1959 Gillette flair-tip SuperSpeed. Carol was surprised to learn how old they were. Neither one was in all that great condition; both of them were corroded, especially on the twist-to-open knob, and the adjustment ring on the Fatboy is stuck.

(Side note. After seeing this Fatboy, I realized that my grandfather’s razor is, in fact, a Slim adjustable. All I can say is that by comparison to everything I was used to, it looked awfully fat!)

I got around to cleaning them last night. I got them both reasonably shiny, though the Fatboy is quite worn, and showing brass through the chrome. I couldn’t get the adjustment ring on it loose, either, and it’s set to 7 currently, which means I won’t be using it any time soon. The SuperSpeed is great, though. I loaded it with a Dorco and had a shave with it this morning.

It was an almost-great shave, too. I got my face baby’s butt smooth, with no redness. I did get several weepers, though, on the last cleanup pass I made going truly against the grain. The “aggressiveness” is about comparable to my Slim set on about 3 or 4, which is plenty for me, but the feel isn’t quite the same. More “snippy” at the same level of blade exposure.

My Slim has the problem that the blade exposure is not completely even on both sides, probably because it was dropped. It’s not a big enough difference to cause a problem, but it is one of the things that makes me want to get the Fatboy working to see how the adjustable is supposed to work.

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