Happy Wednesday From Florida! So awhile back, I slapped together a Green Ever Ready Rubberset brush for myself, re-purposing the horse knot from a Bestshave #6 Turkish Horse. BabyGirl / BG / SWMBO / AKA Shawna [SLASH]decided[/SLASH] [SLASH]declared[/SLASH] [SLASH]demanded[/SLASH] sweetly asked if I would make one for her too. Now if you have ever went in search for a Greenie of your own, you quickly found out that along with Butterscotch the Greenie is very popular and as such comands a fairly high price as it relates to vintage handles. Ebay bidding for them can get pretty high, sometimes as high as $50.00! Fortunately for me I know that even the nastiest Greenie can be snapped back to glory with a few hours of sanding (and now you do too!) So here it is; A Horse Of Her Own... Here is what I started with. As you can see, the Greenie has seen brighter days and next to it is our donor horse. Some people might think that the Greenie is better off left in its current state, that thought does have some merit, but I don't much care for the drab olive green with butterscotch swirl motif. After seeing the thread about the evolution of Butterscotch and judging by the end result, I think this handle started bright green with white swirls that turns butterscotch over time. Speaking of brighter days, here is a great song by one of my favorite bands, Mofro (before changing their name to JJ Grey & Mofro. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghhIQvDsNKs Here is the Greenie after its haircut. I have restored a handful of brushes now and find the process to be very relaxing. Here, I have retired to the porch for a sanding session. I have the Greenie soaking in some hot water and in another bowl I have 200, 320, and 400 grit sand paper soaking in water with a bit of dish detergent in the water to provide a little slip. My Dremel and Dremel accessories are standing by, as is about three fingers of Scotch on the rocks...life is good! Here we are awhile later, the color change is very dramatic! So a couple of Scotches and a few hours later, BG and Trix came out to check on me. Wow! Where did the sun go!?! Hours later the brush is coming along nicely and the water is full of decades old nastiness. I resumed sanding operations the next day. Now that I am putting this article together I realized that there are a couple of pictures missing. I got so caught up in the job I forgot to stop and take a picture of drilling the knot out. I did pause long enough to snap some pix after I had the knot out. There are threads around here that talk about special bits for this kind of work but all I do is drill a pilot hole down the middle of the old knot and then use sanding drums to slowly ream the old knot out. Starting with 200 grit and moving up to 320 and then 400 and then a Scotch Brite pad, several hours / days later you end up with something looking like this: Now that the handle is done it is time to turn our attention to yanking the donor knot. I am a fan of the #6 Turkish Horse and BG is too. Some folks have pointed out QC issues, but considering the brush is less than $5.00 delivered I am okay with buying a dozen and picking out the best of the knots and since I am not going to use the handle it does not matter to me if the knot is not fully seated in glue. With a cutoff wheel in the Dremel we start sectioning the wood handle. Once you get the handle sectioned, you can stick a knife in the slots and break the sectioned chips off. Eventually the knot which is embedded in a polymer and wood dust base will plop out. Now we need to start getting the knot plug cut down to fit in the handle. I decided to open the bore of the handle a little bit rather than sanding down the circumference of the knot plug. The "shelf" that sits between the top and bottom half of the brush was too shallow. My choices at that point were to either shorten the height of the plug, or punch the shelf out. The first brush I did I went with shortening the plug but this time I wanted to have extra surface to glue the plug into the handle with so I decided to punch the shelf. Now the knot fits all the way in to the handle. Time to glue the knot in! Another place where I forgot to take a picture is when I had to fill the void in the handle to build a new shelf for the glue to sit on when seating the knot. You can use about anything. The other brushes that I have done I used quarters to add heft to the handle. BG said she did not want any extra weight so coins were out. I considered paper towels, aluminum foil, and cork but decided that a plastic grocery bag would work. I twisted up a grocery bag and did a couple of test fits. I ended up cutting about an inch off the twisted bag and stuffed the rest of the bag in the handle. It worked perfect, but like I said, I forgot to take a picture! So here we are ready to glue. Most of the threads I have read suggest Devcon adhesive and I have used Devcon before, but the store was out of Devcon the last time I needed glue and used Permatex 5 minute epoxy with satisfactory results. I went with the Permatex again. After waiting about fifteen minutes for the five minute epoxy to cure I started slathering on the wax. Three coats of wax later and here is the result, BG's brush is on the left, mine on the right: BG used it today for her shave and said it works great! The Turkish Horse might not be for everyone, but for us, it does an awesome job! My favorite brushes in the fleet are the re-knots that PanChango / Dale did for me because I was too chicken / lazy to do it myself. After the third brush he did for me he told me I should try it on my own; it is easy. Dale was right, it is easy and a heck of a lot of fun too! So c'mon Ya'll! Let's see you re-knot some old nasty handles!
At least these knots were easier to remove from the polymer base than the Tweezerman I experimented with. That is an excellent job and those horse hair brushes are cheap enough that you can get extras to pick and choose from. A+
Excellent job!! I used the brush this morning. The head is fuller than Jeff's with a bit more body. While it appears stiff, it is not scritchy at all. I definitely had lather left over when I was done shaving today. The color is a limey green, there is a translucence that can't be described. This brush will give my Omega Pro Boar a run for it's money .. I'm looking forward to many more shaves with this brush. Thanks Honeeze!! AWESOME job with this one!!
Wow, what an amazing job! :happy096 I'm sure it will be well used and loved. After seeing this though I've come to the conclusion that a brush restore is not for me. 1. I don't have any of those tools & 2. I'm the least handy guy in the world. I'd cause more damage than anything. I'll have to look into getting someone to do mine one day. Thanks for this post! Keep up the great work.
Jeff, nice job and an even better stepped "how to" article and an enjoyable Saturday read. Congrats to BG on her new brush:happy096
Jeff, when I cleaned up my Rubberset the other day mine unscrewed from the base. Do the Ever-ready's do that? Also, I used an orbital sander to get the old carmelized stuff off. I had top be careful but it did it safely and quickly, just flip it upside down and use the rounded edges to get the curves. I know it's a labor of love, but I was done in about an hour.
I can't say that they all screw off but the few that I have done, yes they screw off, or have the potential for it. Some of them screwed off easily and others will not budge.
