The razor talked about in this thread finally arrived, and I 'm still not sure what it is. It is a Gillette, but it is a mixture of styles. It has an open comb like a New, but with pins (and short ones at that) like a New Improved. The case looks correct, but that doesn't mean that it is. Any ideas?
It looks like it could be a Probak type head. That hole with the outward slot was part of their design. Probak eventually became a division of Gillette. Perhaps British Gillette did do a Goodwill mix and match type thing using leftover parts and cases.
Doesn't that right hand hole/slot look a little crude? It looks like the slot slopes down relative to the horizontal. The one on the left looks OK in that respect. This leads me to wonder if this wasn't something more or less experimental that they never did properly tool up for. I certainly haven't seen anything like that on a Gillette before, but then I'm not all that familiar with the British Gillettes. The hole/slot actually looks more like the ones on a Star Model 100 than anything else that I've seen, but the Star had male pins that matched the slotted holes. Regards, Tom
Does it look like that in person? To my eye, it looks like the top of the slot on the right hole slopes down, but the bottom looks straight. I may be convincing myself, but the bottom of the left hole looks like it slopes up a little. If the same die were used to cut both holes, one would be an upside down version of the other. I think a UK Goodwill is an excellent guess. Very nice!
It appears that these two guard plates are from totally different dies. Note the alignment of the top point of the Gillette diamond in the two pictures. The first one aligns perfectly with the center of the left hole. The second one is aligned to the right of center. Then looking at the first "N" in ENGLAND you can see that once again it is centered with the right hole in the first picture and aligned to the right of center in the second. What does this mean? No idea. But it's just something I noticed.