Some time ago, I did a brush restore for Codfish (Jim). The handle has a corn colored top and a amber Lucite base. Through some research we were able to find that the brush was the same make as this one. So after I completed the restoration (custom 2 band badger 20 mm with 50 mm loft) here was the final view. Since the Mühle emblem was used on the similar brush, Jim decided to contact the source to see if it was a Mühle or not. The next few lines are quoted from Jim on the brush. "I wrote to Christian Muller at Mühle to see if I could get more information about this brush. He was able to identify it as an early model of Mühle's pure badger (Rein Dachs) brushes.He reported to me that the brush was made during the time that his grandfather, Otto Johannes Müller, ran the company (1945-1963). Mühle, it seems, has had an interesting history. It was nationalized by the Nazis duting World War II, and then again by the Soviets when it became part of the Communist-controlled Eastern Block.The brush was made between 1950 and 1954, and was distributed primarily in Soviet countries.Thank you to Christian for giving me some background on this marvelous brush, and to Gary Carrington for his superb restoration of what is now one of my all-time favorite brushes!" Now if you think that is the end of the story, think again. I had one more of these handles that I planned to become my own personal brush. I simply waited on restoring it until I decided on a course of action. I decided that since this was a Mühle brush, a Mühle knot would be in order. I had in my possession the Version 1 STF brush I purchased from Bullgoose in April 2012 to support the first round of Mantic's Synthetic Team testing that took place in the May-June 2012 time frame. In addition each member of team received an Version 1 STF in May 2012 directly from Mühle. Since I had two STF Version 1 brushes, I decided that my smaller 23 mm white handle STF would be sacrificed to supply the knot I wanted for this brush. So the surgery began and the knot was removed by cutting away the handle. The knot was embedded so deep and strong that steam would have been useless so the white handle was scrapped for the vintage handle which was expanded to accept the donor knot. Here is the process before and after shot. The loft on the update was made considerably shorter which after the first test showed a dramatic improvement in performance over the original setting. The age of the handle shows the life that it has led. I polished it up until it was smooth but still retained the color changes that only truly come through the years of time. This setting on the Version 1 fibers makes for a great face lathering brush that still works well bowl lathering. It has great backbone and just a slight amount of scritch. The closest performer would be like a really good two band badger in terms of backbone, softness and slight scritch. Now it is a high performing an interesting looking all Mühle brush.
That badger one is.. Too bad you needed to lunch the Muhle handle..they really built that puppy. At least you got a handle on the restore..
2 January 2015 Shave A very nice shave again with the Schick J3 / Gillette Twin Edged Blade combination. Solid performance was provided by the Matador "croap" and synthetic brush combination.
