My Replating Saga: formerly, Razorplate Question?

I wouldn't think it would be all that hard to make the metal frames. As long as you had some sort of pattern to work from. The metal is thin and easily bendable.

The velvet is on the bottom tray, the logo is on purple silk (or a silk like material). I'm going to go with Royal Purple Thai silk, supposedly hand spun and hand loomed, but at any rate, cheap enough.

I'm discussing the logo thing with a fellow on another forum, and he thinks it's doable:
" ...I have silver and gold metallics, Extremely thin and bed down very deep into the fabric; almost like an ink print it's so low profile. I've been meaning to try this out for a while to see how it looked.

Doable...absolutely...Affordable? The cost of a piece of material to cover the area inside of a Gillette lid would be almost negligible."

and
"...the only thing that may limit us is the small size of the design itself. These designs are cut out of thin vinyl film with a tiny blade, but there's still only so small you can go before the blade mangles the vinyl. I'm confident, though. If I can get it to cut cleanly, I'm certain I can weed the excess from it even though it may be slow and delicate.

If it works... It will be a winner."

If it doesn't work, I will look into doing it the old fashioned way, hot stamping, as detailed on this site:
http://www.csparks.com/Bookbinding/GoldTitles/index.xhtml

 

Nice. I knew they did case replating, but it slipped my mind that they still did it. The guy I'm going to be sending my stuff to would have fixed that dent as well. That all being said, Razor Emporium did quit replating cases for a while, until they figured out that rhodium was not a suitable material for replating cases.

As an FYI, for anyone curious, rhodium is harder than nickel. It's about the same hardness as chrome, and is extremely inert. So inert, it doesn't tarnish. This makes it an excellent choice for replating razors.

The downside is that it is brittle. Brittle enough that the slight pressure required to open some razor cases and the squeeze-to-open blade cases is enough to crack the plating. In minor fracturing, it spiderwebs...in major, chunks of plating peel away. Even Gillette on their ultra high end sets with rhodium plated razors, plated the cases in nickel. Razor Emporium lost a good deal of money on that before they realized what was causing the issue.

Sorry for the history lesson, guys, I tend to ramble sometimes. That satin nickel doesn't look half bad, but it's not my cup of tea. I like shiny things.

 

I probably would have too. The wrong blade case being in that set would still have bugged me though.

 

There may be hope for you yet. Per a conversation I'm having with Jay (one of his replies to me):

"I was just thinking .... the lower case inserts below the velvet seem to be the things that really get the bad treatment - with the rusting that they are prone to. If you ever come across any you find need complete replacement, done as ABS inserts, let me know .... They would be incredibly easy to model in 3D CAD software and I could print them out...on professional 3D printers that I have (another hobby LOL)."

 

The Saga continues...
I was able to source some material. It's not a perfect match, it's stretchy for one, but far, far closer than I expected to get, both in texture (feel) and color.


For the actual one, I will probably use tailor's chalk rather than a sharpie, but this is "good enough" for now.

I didn't use adhesive, as this is basically a dry run to see if the pattern was accurate enough. In the original assembly of these, I'm not sure if they started at the blade tray end or the blade bank end. I'm fairly sure they started at the blade tray end, but for this run, I started with the blade bank section.


On the original fabric, part of it was retained by the little tabs on either side of the blade compartment. This contributed to the original's seamless look. I did the same.


I used a 'glasses repair' sized screwdriver to push the fabric into the tabs. Putting the blade bank in the frame pushed the tabs closed again.

Here's the last picture of the completed blade bank section, minus the blade bank.

It's not perfect right now, but if I was using adhesive it would be. I will need to pick up adhesive to check the blade tray fit, so I will be doing that sometime this week.

 

Good question. That was my original plan, however, the replater offered to strip it down to bare metal and replate it to stop the rusting. He is then going to use it as a template for making ABS plastic 3D printed models, to replace frames in future replating orders that are too far gone to salvage.

 

Mmm. He's actually about two steps ahead of me. See his latest update below: