Have you a story about the first time you saw or handled a straight? Was it just in an old knick knack shop? Granddad's? Or do you have a story to tell? Mine was this.... Due to being a troubled/disruptive kid I ended up in a boarding school for this kind of lad. Pretty boring, Let out 1 weekend a month. Well I made my own amusement. One of the things I did was explore at night the places I couldn't get to in the day. The kitchen was the start, Out my window, up the drain pipe to the flat roof to the kitchen sky lights. Food!! I ended up doing banana on toast and eating nice things The school offices beaconed. Kitchen window, court yard, office corridor window, bingo ! one file cabinet lock picking later produced the keys to all the offices. Turned out our Deputy head teacher Mr West (A stern Yorkshire Man) had kept all confiscated property in his office cupboard over the years. There was my first experience of handling a straight. Yup, You guessed, I stole it. Later my brother stole it from me and took it to school only to get it confiscated again :happy102 This my story/confession. Note I would not take whats not mine these days.
My senior year in high school. Dad got me started and I was too dumb to know how complicated it was supposed to be. Shaved like that for a couple of years, then got in a hurry w/ life...:angry032 25 years later I finally grew up and slowed down. Bob
I grew weary of shaving with dull blades (being too lazy to search the 'bay for more overpriced and discontinued cartridges for my TracII) A buddy had given me a straight razor years before, and I decided to try to use it. It wouldn't shave, so a few weeks later my buddy had me check out SRP and I learned how to use it - had a fine shave this morning, in fact, with a razor I paid $10 for, and have used dozens of times with no ill effects
As a kid I found a old straight razor in a cabinet from my dead grandpa. My parents dont know nothing about it. It was still quite sharp (not shaveready ) and so I decided to play and to carve with it. It took not 5 minutes and I had broke a great part out of the blade So I throwed it away and hopped, nobody will notice something. For this disdoing I still paying. In the meantime I restored over hundreds of straight razors to wash my blemish away
Thanks for the replies keep em' coming guys and gals ! By the way Buddel you have got me started on a path I probably didn't need to travel down. Damascus steel ! I was aware of folded steel by the age of 8, forgot about it in later life then I saw you Damascus Razor. I only need to wash about fifteen hundred trucks to get a nice Damascus steel TI
Sparticus, you little hell raiser! Great story! Mine is not as entertaining. My first interest was here at the Den after I began DE shaving. I kept seeing all the pictures of so many different blades. Some scary, some down right sexy looking. After I became comfortable and confident with my DE skills, I began to look to the horizon. I would read some posts by my fellow DE razorites dabbling into the Str8 realm and went out and bought a Magic shavette. Trying my best to learn from their mistakes and other articles I've read, I managed to get about 5 so-so shaves without very little blood loss. Thanks 1 old GI. And from the goodness of one of the members here, donating a st8 to the Den, then Jo Anna deciding to fuel my fire and donate this str8 to me, I have begun my path to shaves of the manliest nature to heightened pleasures. I am still not comfortable, nor skilled enough to try ATG with it, but I WILL conquer the steel even if I must ask for blood donors.
Funny you should ask... LOL, I'm having my first experience as we speak. Well sorta. I made the drastic leap from my Gillette Fusion razors with 5 blades, to a single straight razor 4 days ago. Why you ask? well I was sick of spending $80 a month on blades since I shave my head too. Let’s just put it this way. After my FIRST shave, my poor wife looked at me and said, what the hell happened? You look like you were in the losing end of a knife fight. Yea I took several layers of skin off quite a few spots on my head, until I realized that the razor I had bought wasn’t correctly sharpened, and began the long laborious process of reading everything I could about sharpening, the correct method for stropping the blade, etc. Well, 4 days later and I'm getting a much closer shave, with far less "scarring" but as a result my shave time has now gone from 5 minutes to oh a little over an hour. I'm hoping to cut that down by about a half in the next month or so
Awesome! Funny enough it was the thought of a Fusion that made me go for a straight, (kept stubble for a few years). Real glad you stuck to it after the first bad experience. You sure will get to less than half that time as well.
!!!! They are real nice people round here :happy005 BTW, I don't shave ATG with a straight after watching Mantic's video's. Can get DFS WTG on a 3 pass shave. Not BBS but its getting closer the better I get.
Summer 1981 Sometime after my 22nd B-day I decided that I was going to grow a beard, a very light beard of course, after all it was cool back then to have that look going on... So after it had the great grizzled look, I happened to stop in to get my hair cut, now my Barber back then, David, took one look at me and said, "What the **** is that on yer face" I of course proudly replied "My beard what do ya think" Dave piped up "Gee Glen looks like crap, let's straighten it up" So he proceeds to sit me down and gets the lather ready, does the whole hot towel treatment, which I am good with, until he starts stropping that straight razor.... I say "David yer not touching me with that thing" He laughs and says "Relax and enjoy it idiot" Well David trimmed up my beard, and put in perfectly straight lines, explained that if you want straight lines you need to use a straight edge Yada Yada Yada, I politely listen and thought to myself, no way... That night working at one of the big Nightclubs in Denver it seemed that way to many cute gals were paying way to much attention to me, and I got multiple compliments on how nice my beard looked....Well being the red blooded guy I was, I of course was at the Barber shop the next day bugging David to help me get into straight razors.. I bought 2 razors from a knifeshop that carried them, along with an Illinois 305 strop and a 7x2x1 White stone that back then cost me $105 to keep them sharp... I remember that one of the razors had gold etch that said Sheffield Steel and the other was a rather plain Solingen...David showed me how to maintain the razors edges with lather on the stone and 10 x laps weekly and how to strop... I dropped and cracked the second razor in either 2000 or 2001 and got away from straights until 2007 when I started back with them again... The strop has finally been retired, although still in good condition, and the stone is still in use... So that was my first experience with straights....I had always used a brush and soap puck...
