Last year, I wrote an article on this blog about the time I discovered pair of sterling silver cufflinks with the Scotch College school crest on them. Discovered online, it was the biggest shock of my life that such a pair of cufflinks might even exist! I absolutely had to have them, and come hell-or-high-water, I added them to my collection.

This posting is all about the unlikely, and frankly – unexpected – sequel to the discovery of nine months previous.

Suffice to say that I was contacted by a retired antiques dealer up in Brisbane, who said that he’d stumbled across my blog while researching a discovery that he’d made in a pile of scrap gold and jewelry. His researches had led him to my blog, and after reading the first article I’d written about the sterling silver Scotch College cufflinks that I’d found, he was very eager to get in touch with me.

We made contact via text-message, and that was when he dropped the bombshell information on me that while digging around in some of his antique jewelry, he’d found a pair of the same cufflinks in 9ct solid gold!

I’ll admit it took me a couple of minutes to register this information. Silver cufflinks belonging to a high school are rare enough, but solid gold ones!? And antiques!? What the hell’s the chances of that?? He told me that he’d found my silver pair while researching the school motto, and asked me if I would like to buy the matching gold ones as well!

Uh, no. Thanks. It’s fine, no really…

OF COURSE I SAID YES!!

After exchanging a couple of photographs and confirming what they were, and that they were real, we tossed a few numbers back and forth, finally settling on a price, with free express postage thrown in! They arrived within 24 hours, and were everything that I’d hoped them to be!

As you can see, these cufflinks are the exact same size, and design as the sterling silver pair in my previous posting. For this reason, I figured that they were made during the same era – the late 1920s through the 1930s, and manufactured by the Melbourne-based firm of G. Damman’s, which held a large jeweler’s and tobacconists’s premises on the corners of Swanston & Collins Streets in the Melbourne CBD.

I do not know for what reason, nor under what circumstances cufflinks of such quality were manufactured for, and sold by, the school, and we may never know, but the fact that they exist at all is tantalising and fascinating! I absolutely love having both sets in my collection, and I think I can safely say that I would never, ever sell them!

Where the hell would I ever find another set!?

One of the most unusual elements about this whole story is where the cufflinks came from – not Melbourne, not even Victoria. No! They came all the way from Queensland, up near Brisbane!

How on earth a pair of antique gold high school cufflinks from Melbourne ended up in a suburb just outside Brisbane on the other end of the country is anyone’s guess, but now they’re back home in Melbourne where they belong, and safe in the company of their silver brethren!

Other Scotch College Memorabilia

Along with gold and silver cufflinks, the school also commissioned everything from chinaware and cups, glasses, tie-bars, tie-pins, badges, cigarette lighters (also commissioned from Damman’s Jewelers) and stationery. You can still buy a lot of this stuff (OK, maybe not the lighters) from the school, brand-new, or if you’re after something vintage, then online.

I’m very pleased to be given the chance to add these, possibly quite rare, cufflinks to my collection, where they can rest alongside their sterling silver brethren!

So, here’s something that I picked up at my local flea-market on the weekend. It was dusty, grimy, battered, and very, very faded. Despite that, a cursory examination told me that it was actually in excellent condition, despite being, what I judged, to be upwards of 100+ years old! It took me all of five minutes to decide that I really wanted this, and haggled a discounted price with the stallholder, and trotted away a very, very happy young man.

Once I got the folio home, I started examining it in more detail.

The more I looked at it, the more it appeared to me that this beautiful leather-good was significantly older than I initially believed. The styling of the pockets, as well as their general orientation and size, as well as the tri-opening panels, were all reminiscent of men’s wallets from the Edwardian era of the early 1900s – only – larger. Much larger!

Added to these observations was the fact that the folio was devoid of any modern features. No zippers, no snap-buttons, no elastic strap to hold it shut, no plastic of any kind, and – surprisingly – no indication at all – of where it was made! There wasn’t a thing on it, or in it, to tell me anything about it! No maker’s marks, no company logos, trademarks, company names, retailers’ addresses…nothing!

Once I got it home, I started the restoration process. This mostly consisted of double-checking, and reinforcing any loose or missing stitching – and going through the original needle-holes, where possible, to hold the folio together (fortunately, there wasn’t much of this which had to be done!). The next step was to clean the leather, and then came the labourous task of polishing it.

For this, I used ordinary dark tan boot-polish…and my right hand. Honestly, I just find it so much easier to apply shoe polish with your fingers, than fiddling around with a cloth or polishing rag of some kind. I just scooped it up, smeared it onto the leather, and started rubbing it in with my fingers. Once it was on, I just used a regular buffing brush to distribute and work the polish into the grain, spreading it out, and in, as I went. This was the real calorie-burner! I started on the outside and worked my way in, removing the belt entirely because it’d just get in the way (I polished that separately, later on).

The next thing to do was to do the interior. This was much more fiddly because of all the pockets and sleeves, but I got there in the end. Here, you can see what the folio looked like originally, vs. what it looked like when I was done…

Originally, the entire folio was this sort of…paper-bag brown. You can still see hints of the original colour showing through, where it had faded over the years (this also accounts for the uneven colour-distribution on the left and right). The interior received the same hand-applied polish and brushing, and then the entire thing was rubbed all over with a generous amount of dubbin.

Here you can see the final product, with the folio closed-up and belted…

…and the other side…

One element which I really loved was the decorative tooling around the belt-loop:

And finally, the interior…

If you look on the right, you might be able to see a light discolouration – a horizontal line running across the middle of the panel – that’s the result of the strap or belt being fastened across it for years and years, and the leather fading as a result.

Here it is fully opened…

On the left are three pockets (two small ones on top, one big one underneath). Next to them is the loop or sleeve to hold a writing instrument. The loop is VERY small. It will hold a pencil, or a dip pen, but that’s about it! Part of the restoration will have to involve enlarging (or replacing) this loop so that the folio can actually store at least one, decent sized fountain pen for the future!

The central panel holds one large pocket for storing documents, and three smaller ones for storing stamps and cards. Finally, on the right is one more large pocket, again for storing papers and documents. If you look very close, you can see the remains of an elastic strap sewn into the leather bordering, which would’ve been used to hold a notebook in place. Replacing that will be another part of the restoration.

Restoring the Folio

Apart from cleaning, polishing and rubbing in beeswax, the folio needed a few minor repairs and alterations. I hand-sewed some of the corners and edges where the stitching had come undone, to hold the folio together and to stop the pockets from tearing. Where possible I used the original stitch-holes to keep things neat, and also to preserve the integrity of the leather.

The next step was replacing the pen-loop. The original loop was extremely small and a pencil barely fit inside. To remove it, I cut away the original stitching using a pocketknife, removed the old leather forming the loop, used it as a pattern to cut a new piece of very thin leather, folded it over, stuck it inside, and using my sewing machine, I sewed the new loop back into place where the old one had been – again, using the original stitching-holes to try and keep things neat. The change is barely perceptible, but now, the new loop can actually hold a pen! I deliberately sewed the new loop out from the seam by about half a centimeter or thereabouts, so that it could fit a decent-sized modern fountain pen (and most vintage ones, too).

The final step in the restoration was sewing in a new, black elastic book strap (see above). To do this, I cut the stitches around the old book strap, removed the worn out remains of the old elastic, fed the new elastic through the same hole and sewed it back in. Then I stretched the elastic across, repeated the same thing on the other side, and sewed that in as well. To get the tension right (if it’s too loose, the book will just flop around everywhere), I measured the length, and then cut off two inches so that the elastic would have to stretch the last two inches, giving the right tension.

And here’s the final result:

As you can see, there have been a few changes. The enlarged pen-loop will now hold a modern cartridge-converter sized fountain pen (the pen in question is a Montblanc No. 145), and it has been made out of leather of a very similar shade to the original. In time, it will age to look more or less exactly the same.

The black elastic strap now holds the book in place, allowing me to flip it over either side, and access the two large pockets without having to remove the book entirely.

All in all, a great result!

Not bad for a $15.00 purchase at the flea-market.

Pocketknives are fascinating little gadgets. Whether it’s a tiny 2.1/2-inch quill-knife, or a larger 5 or 6-inch stiletto, pocketknives have been part of our lives for centuries. Carried and used for everything from survival situations to cutting open boxes that come through the mail from eBay, opening mail, eating food, carving, cutting, slicing, opening cans, or even something as mundane as sharpening a pencil – pocketknives have been the go-to mainstay tool for all these tasks for generations.

Collecting pocketknives is a highly popular hobby. Most knives are relatively cheap, portable, robust, and don’t take up a great deal of space. The wide variety of knife-patterns, blade-types, decorative elements, manufacturers and sizes in pocketknives is what makes them so collectible, and knives from famous manufacturers, made of rare or precious materials, or which were limited editions, can command high prices on the secondhand market.

In this posting, I’ll be talking about the general restoration process behind breathing new life into the type of pocketknife that most people will be familiar with: The standard slip-joint pocketknife, as typified by those made by W.R. Case, Victorinox, J. Rodgers & Sons, Southern & Richardson, and countless other manufacturers during the 1800s, and the majority of the 20th century.

Basic Knife Anatomy

In this posting, I’ll be talking about slip-joint knives: the kind of knife with a blade that folds back into the handle, so everything going forward, will relate to this style of knife.

To begin at the beginning, we need to know what the various parts of the knife are.

The body of the knife is made up of various components, which are stacked, one on top of the other, and held together with metallic rods.

On the outsides, working our way in, we have the bolsters. Not all knives have these. Some do, some don’t. Some have them on both sides of the knife, some only have them on one side. Bolsters are the flat, metallic panels at either end of a pocketknife. They’re usually brass, nickel-silver, stainless steel or some other corrosion-resistant metal. Their purpose is to strengthen the knife, and to protect the covers or scales on the sides of the handle, from damage.

Covers, also called scales, are the large, decorative panels which make up the majority of the bulk on the handle of a folding knife. Covers can be simply utilitarian, and be made of plastic, or steel or brass, but usually, they’re decorative. Pocketknives have had scales or covers made of anything from sterling silver to mother of pearl, ivory, bone, horn, any number of a variety of different woods, and various types of plastics in any number of finishes. Depending on the knife, scales may be smooth, or corrugated/textured. Textured scales are typically added to a knife to make it easier to grip.

Inlaid into the scales are (although, not always) small, metal panels, which can be almost any shape – rectangular, shield, circular…the list goes on. These are sometimes included for the purposes of embellishment (and to give the customer a place to engrave something like a name, date, or initials), or else, will contain details such as the company’s name, logo, or other trademark. These small panels are known as shields, badges or plates, depending on which name-convention you take to heart. Not all knives have these, but most will. They’re usually made of either brass, or nickel-silver.

The bolsters and the scales fit onto flat strips of metal, known as liners. Usually, they’re made of brass, so as not to rust and jam the knife.

Between the scales, bolsters and liners is the spring. The spring is the flat strip of metal at the bottom of the knife (or the top of the handle, if holding the knife with the blade-edge facing down). The spring is made of spring steel, which is nice and flexible. The spring is what holds the blades of the knife open, or closed.

Finally, you have the blades of the knife. Anything that comes out of a knife is known as a ‘blade’, regardless of whether it actually is a blade, or not. Knives can have anywhere from one, to two, three, four, or more blades, and extra features, depending on the knife’s size, and complexity. I won’t cover all this here, because otherwise we’ll be here all day.

Finally, the knife is held together with pins and rivets. The pins are driven through the bolsters, liners, and blades, and are then hammered and peened over, and smoothed off, to hold the knife together. Smaller rivets or pins are used to hold the scales or covers onto the liners, to stop them from coming loose.

A standard slip-joint folding pocketknife will have two pins for holding in the blades and bolsters (one pin on each end of the knife), a third pin in the middle, to hold the spring in place along with the liners and covers/scales, and usually (but not always) extra pins or rivets to hold the scales in place. As with the liners, the pins or rivets are usually brass, nickel-silver, or stainless steel.

Some pocketknives have additional features, such as the very popular lockback mechanism. The lockback mechanism is a toggle or button located at the back of the knife. When the knife is opened, the ‘lock’ prevents the back-spring from shifting, keeping the blade steady while you’re using it. Pressing the toggle depresses the back-spring, which allows the exposed blade to be unlocked and swung back into the closed position. Lockback mechanisms are popular because they prevent the knife from closing unexpectedly if the blade is being used for particularly aggressive tasks (carving, splitting firewood, cutting particularly difficult materials, etc). Because of this, it’s usually seen as a safety mechanism, to prevent user injury.

Blade Anatomy

Now that we’ve covered basic pocketknife anatomy, let’s cover blade-anatomy. At one end you have the point, at the other end, you have the heel. Behind the heel you have the tang. The tang is the part of the blade through which the rivets and pins are passed to hold the blade to the handle. The tang is also where information such as the knife model, or manufacturer-details, are stamped.

At the bottom of the blade you have the edge, at the top, you have the spine. In between is the belly, or main body of the blade. Just below the spine you will have a slit or groove, commonly called a nail-nick or nail-pull. This is the indent which you put your fingernail into, to pull the blade open from the handle.

Buying Antique and Vintage Pocketknives

Pocketknives range from the mundane to the magnificent, from the pedestrian to the precious. Part of the thrill of owning them – of owning any collection – is the thrill of the hunt!

Antique and vintage pocketknives are highly collectible, and they can often be found in antiques shops or flea-markets for a handful of dollars, or online, for significantly more. In buying vintage folding pocketknives, you want to check a number of aspects before coughing up the money.

First and foremost – make sure that the knife is complete. Are all the scales there? Are there any missing pins? Dropped-off bolsters? Broken blades? I know that a lot of knives look very solidly made, but bolsters, pins and scales can all drop off over time, and you want to make sure that all aspects of the knife are firm and tight before you go any further. I bought a pocketknife once which was so badly constructed, it literally fell apart in my hands one day, and I had to throw it out.

Does your knife do that?

No? Good.

Next: Make sure (and this is very important) that the knife is as free from rust as it’s possible for it to be. Unless they’ve been very well cared for, almost all vintage pocketknives will have some sort of rusting on them. Age-spots or pitting may also present themselves, but rust is the real enemy here.

Rust can spread, rust can compromise the integrity of the blade, rust can even cause the knife to snap in half! Any knives with a LOT of rust should be avoided entirely.

After that, make sure that the knife actually functions! Do the blades open? Are they easy to open? Are they stiff? Can you yank them out without snapping your fingernails off? Once opened, do the blades stay open? Do they flop around? Is there any side-to-side wobble? When closed, do they stay closed? Do the blades strike each other (or the liners) when closing next to each other?

I’ve seen some beautiful pocketknives which looked flawless…until you tried to use them. Knives should have nice, strong springs that will cause the blades to ‘snap’ – meaning that the spring will have enough tension on it that the blades will click open or shut, with an audible ‘snap!’ each time. You do not want a knife with weak, floppy springs, that can’t hold the blades open or shut – it’s a safety risk! Put the knife down, and keep searching.

Similarly (on multi-blade knives), make sure that the blades close properly. You don’t want a knife where one blade constantly strikes another blade when closing – it damages the blade, wastes time, means you have to sharpen it more, indicates that the knife is falling apart (or was poorly made), and it’s a safety issue!

Restoring your Pocketknives

Once you’ve purchased your knife, the next thing to do is to breathe new life into it. A lot of vintage knives spend years, decades, in drawers and shoe-boxes, down the back of the couch, and god knows where else! And they are hardly ever looked after. If you expect that beautiful horn-scaled pen-knife that you bought for $30.00 to work like new – it’s now your job to try and give that knife a new lease on life – to ensure that it does work like new!…Or as near to new as it’s possible for it to do so.

This next section of the posting is all about tips and tricks to restore your pocketknives to working condition. All this advice and guidance is assuming that you’re an everyday collector with no prior experience in fixing stuff. No fancy tools or equipment are involved in this, and everything mentioned should be stuff that you can find around the house (or which is easily purchased). These instructions will assume that the knife will remain whole and intact during the entire process. No disassembly will be required.

You will need…

• A box of tissues.
• Cotton-buds/Q-tips.
• Extra-fine-grit sandpaper (as fine as you can get).
• 0000-grade steel wool (designed for polishing).
• A thin, highly fluid, lubricating oil (for sewing machines, or similar).
• Polishing paste or fluid (eg: Brasso).
• Sharpening stones.
• Water.
• Optional: Ultrasonic Cleaner.

The first thing to do is to remove all the surface grime. This can easily be done with some oil, and tissue-paper. Drip some oil over the body of the knife and blades, and fill the cavity in the handle with oil, then wipe and sponge it away with some tissues. This will remove any surface grime, grit, and other easily removed detritus. It is important to use oil as much as possible, and not water, as water will encourage rusting, and the spread of any existing rust, which is the last thing you want to happen.

Once the initial cleaning has been completed and you’ve removed as much crud as possible, the next step is the much more fiddly process of removing grime from between the springs and pivot-points inside the knife. This could take a few hours, a few days, or even a week or more, depending on the condition of the knife.

One of the biggest nightmares with vintage pocketknives are all the problems associated with stiff, jerky, jammed blades. Blades which are difficult to pull open, difficult to push shut, which don’t snap into place, and which jam and stick when they’re being used. Not only is this annoying, painful on your fingernails because you can’t get the damn blades open, and wastes time, it’s also a big safety-risk, since all the extra effort required to manipulate the knife can leave you prone to injuries. Nobody wants to fight with a stuck blade only for it to spring open unexpectedly and cut them.

Cleaning the Springs and Pivots

It’s for these reasons that the next step is so important: Flushing out the back-springs and pivots on your knife. It’s a fiddly, messy, time-consuming job – something best done while watching YouTube videos or listening to music, or enjoying a good movie – but it is nonetheless a necessary evil.

Get some tissue-paper and fold it until you have a soft pad. Place it on a hard surface like a tabletop. Flood the pivot-points and back-spring of your knife where-ever there is movement. Open and close the blades several times – dozens of times, hundreds of times. If necessary, you can wrap the blades in tissue-paper so that you can grip the blades safely while you open and close them – this will minimise the chance of cutting yourself, and will help you maintain a firm grip on the blades.

Every few dozen manipulations, close the knife and, pressing the spring-side of the handle against the pad of tissue-paper, rub it vigorously back and forth several times.

Now, watch in horror as black, grey, brown, gunky slime comes oozing out of the knife and all over your pad of tissues.

Ever wondered why your knives keep jamming? Ever wondered why they’re so damn stiff, and difficult to open? Ever wondered why your fingernails keep breaking every time you try and yank out a blade?

This is why.

The black sludge you see coming out of the knife is years, decades’-worth of grime, dust and other things caught up inside the knife-mechanism, which causes friction, abrasion and jamming. Since pocketknives are usually very close-fitting, it takes a minuscule amount of this grime to cause a lot of problems. Now imagine what a large amount of this grime causes!

Continue to flush, manipulate, and rub the back of the knife with tissue-paper as rigorously as you can. Filling the knife with oil washes out the grime. Manipulating the blades and springs shifts and loosens the dirt while also working the oil through the knife mechanism. Wiping the knife across the tissue-paper draws the grime-clogged oil out of the knife via capillary action, removing the grit that’s causing all the friction and jamming.

This process can be quite involved. It could take hours, days, even weeks to accomplish. You have to keep going until the oil that comes out of the knife is as clear as when it went in. The more of the grime you remove, the better the end-result will be.

Simply oiling the knife will not improve it. All you’ll do is shift the grime around, and attract even more dust into the knife. When the oil dries up (and it will), the knife will simply jam all over again. Flushing the grime out with oil and wicking it away with tissue-paper is the only way to really get the knife clean and functional, short of drilling out the pins and tearing the knife apart to its component pieces in order to clean them individually.

While you’re cleaning the springs, make sure you remove as much grime from around the pivots as well, by using a similar method. Flood the knife with oil, work the blades to shift the oil, and then stuff a folded wad of tissue-paper into the knife and into the gaps around the pivots to draw out the oil and grime trapped inside.

The more you do this, the less crud there will be inside the knife and the smoother the knife will operate when you’re finally done. When done properly, the knife should (in most cases, anyway) have blades which will open and close with a nice sharp ‘snap!’ as it should do, when new. If the blades still jam or stick, then continue the process, until they don’t. If you use your knife often, then you should repeat this process every few years to prevent even more build-up of grime that will be harder to remove later.

Rust Removal

When the knife has reached this stage (or as close to that stage as you can), then the next step is to remove as much rust (if any) as you can from the knife.

Rust builds up where there’s steel – specifically the back-spring, the blades, and their tangs. In the old days, blades were protected from rusting by polishing them to a shine, and either plating them (usually with nickel), or else by keeping them oiled. In instances where the nickel-plating is intact, minor polishing with a liquid polish such as Brasso will be enough to restore the shine and remove the surface-rust, if any.

Heavier rusting will require the use of either a chemical rust-remover, or else, a gentle abrasive such as extra-fine steel wool, or a combination of 0000-grade steel wool and some oil, or polishing liquid to act as lubricant. It will remove the rust, polish the blade, and so long as the blades are kept dry – will prevent the return of any extra rust. Removing rust from either side of the back-spring can be done with fine sandpaper and oil, or with clumps of 0000-grade steel wool, and finished off with a suitable metal polish.

Removing Chips and Cracks

When buying antiques, one of the most common things one has to think about is what one can comfortably afford, what one is willing to pay for an item, and what kinds of compromises one is willing to accept in order to get the object that they truly desire.

As I’ve mentioned in other postings about buying antiques: The more things you’re willing to compromise on, the wider the range (and the cheaper the prices), of things you’re able to buy.

If you do buy a knife with a chipped or cracked blade, however, you still need to try and buy the best that you can. Typically speaking, any chips that you might find should be as small as possible (ideally, no more than 1-2mm), and any cracks should be near the tip of the blade. This makes them easier to deal with.

If you do find a knife that you really like, that you would love to buy, but which does have a tiny little niggling chip that might be dissuading you from forking out the money – don’t worry! There are ways of fixing this!

Sharpening Your Knife

For reasons of safety, sharpening your pocketknives should always be the last thing that you do, once all other restorative processes have been completed. Trying to clean, polish, lubricate, or otherwise restore a knife with freshly sharpened blades in the way invites unnecessary danger, and should be avoided if possible.

To sharpen your knife, you’ll need 2-3 different sharpening stones. A coarse-grit one, a medium-grit and a fine-grit one. Depending on how blunt your knife is, you’ll want to start on the medium and then progress to fine, or coarse then medium, and maybe after that (if necessary) progress to fine.

Before you start on this, though – we need to deal with any of those tiny chips that I mentioned earlier.

If your blade does have chips – provided that they’re small and don’t bite into the belly of the blade too far – then this is when we get rid of them!

First – identify any chips. Then – get your coarsest sharpening stone. Lubricate it with water, and start running your blade – edge down – across the stone, like you’re trying to cut the stone in half with your knife. Make sure that the blade-edge is level on the stone as you do this, and that the blade isn’t angled to the left or right while doing this.

By ‘cutting’ across the stone like this, what you’re doing is scraping off excess metal from the blade-edge. This will wear down the edge until it meets up with the top of the chip that you’re trying to grind out. It’s for this reason that this trick really only works with SMALL chips – anything larger than 1-2mm (unless it’s a REALLY big knife!) will grind off too much metal for this little blade-hack to work on.

It’s worth noting that if you do have to do this – you should do it BEFORE you sharpen the blade, since obviously, grinding the blade like this will affect the edge.

Keep grinding down the edge until just before the nick disappears. Once you reach this spot, sharpen the knife as per-usual, starting on the coarse stone, and then moving to medium and then fine. The usual sharpening process will remove the last vestiges of the chip, leaving you with a clean, sharp, straight blade!

The Correct Sharpening Procedure

I’ve been sharpening knives for years – when you collect pocketknives and straight razors, it’s something you absolutely have to learn. It’s too damn expensive to ask somebody else to do it every single time!

Lubricate your chosen sharpening stones with plenty of water (I usually use a spray-bottle for this), and start from the coarsest grit and work your way up to finest. Exactly how coarse you start depends on how blunt the knife is. In most cases, a medium-to-fine sharpening will do, but for really terrible blades, coarse-medium-fine may have to be used.

Once the stones have been selected and lubricated (you may need to keep lubricating them as you sharpen), it’s time to sharpen the blades.

To stop your stones sliding all over the place – either put them into their bases (if bases they have), or else, put them on top of a small towel or flannel to hold them in place.

Place the knife-blade flat down on the surface, and raise the blade to about 10-15 degrees (or 45 degrees, then half of that, then half of that again), to get the right angle. Start drawing the knife, edge-first, back and forth across the stone at least two dozen times. Repeat for the other side of the blade. Then move up to the next least-coarse stone, and then up to the finest, repeating the two-dozen strokes per-side for each stone as you go along.

Once fully sharpened, cleaned and dried, you should be able to see (and feel) the blade’s sharpness. Hold it up to the light. A freshly sharpened blade will have a very thin, white line along the very edge of the blade (the burr). The burr is the excess metal that’s been ground off the blade during the sharpening process. If you run your finger across the blade, you might even be able to feel the soft prickliness of the tiny flakes of metal scraped off in the sharpening process.

Closing Remarks

Now that your knife has been flushed out, de-grimed, de-rusted, sharpened, and nursed back to health, it should be ready to give you many decades of excellent service.

When it comes to collecting, buying or selling antiques – one of the hardest things to shift – either towards you, or away from you – are things which come in sets.

Sets are larger, sets cost more, sets have pieces that go missing, sets take up more space, they weigh more, and postage and delivery costs go up as a result. But when you can find a set in great condition, you hold onto it!

This is why antique sets of…anything…are always so hard to find. If you find them, if you can find them, and they’re in fantastic condition, then they have gigantic price-tags. And if you find them, and the price is reasonable, then there’s almost certain to be some kind of strings attached.

This is why I jumped at the chance to secure this beautiful set of matched, antique straight razors, when I saw them for sale online.

Back in the days when the only way to get a decent shave was to master the use of a cutthroat razor, manufacturers went above and beyond to try and make the shaving experience as enjoyable as possible.

One way of doing this was to sell razors in sets – pairs, threes, fours, and if you could afford it, even full, seven-day weeklies. Handsomely presented in wooden boxes with fitted interiors lined in fabric, these sets were designed to entice men to take pride and enjoyment in the art of shaving. They were status-symbols, intended to make you want to use them – to take care of them – and to want to learn how to use them.

Today – such multi-razor sets are prized, and rare, antiques. To find a set in complete and functional condition with minimal wear or damage is becoming increasingly hard, and any such sets usually command high prices. I consider it nothing but great fortune to have landed this deal for under $150.00!

Multi-Razor Sets – Whys and Wherefores?

Multi-razor sets are a strange beast, a curious relic of a bygone age. When’s the last time you went out to buy a new razor, and got told by the salesman at the grooming-supplies store, that you had the option of buying razors in two, three, four, or even seven-piece sets of matching razors?

Never. That’s when. And yet, in an age when one straight razor was just as likely to do as good a job as two, or four, or seven, multi-razor sets were surprisingly common. Sold by department stores, famous manufacturers, and jewelry and luxury-merchandise retailers, sets containing multiple razors were often presented in handsome cases made of wood, covered in leather, swathed in velvet and silk, and with gold-leaf logos and company names stamped on the lids.

But why? Why bother? What’s the point of having more than one razor, when one razor will do just as good a job as two or more?

Multi-razor sets were popular in the Victorian era and the first half of the 20th century, because using a straight razor required considerably more skill than a modern cartridge razor, or even a double-edged safety razor. Straight razors took more skill to strop, and sharpen, and maintain overall. Because of this, having a set of multiple razors allowed you to spread out your shaves across multiple blades, thereby reducing wear on the blades, and by extension, reduce the number of times that it was necessary to sharpen a razor – not a skill that everybody was well-versed in (assuming that they even had the necessary equipment to carry out such a task).

Sharpening razors was done by your local barber, the man who was more likely to know everything about razor maintenance than anybody else in town. To avoid paying for his sharpening services too often, razors were simply rotated and stropped as often as possible, to avoid having to visit the barber. Only when the razors were so blunt that stropping alone wouldn’t return them to full sharpness, would the razors then be touched up again on a razor hone, to bring them up to working condition.

Drawing out the times between sharpening periods was important for another reason, quite apart from cost: Blade wear.

Straight razors have very, very thin blades – thin enough to snap with your bare hands, if you’re not worried about slicing your fingers off, first – and because of this, the edges of the blades can get worn down very easily from excessive or incorrect sharpening. Razors which are over-zealously sharpened can suffer from “smiling” or “frowning”, where the edges (smiling) or the middle (frowning) of the blade-edge are so ground-down by abrasion that the physical blade starts to lose its shape – they aren’t called STRAIGHT razors for nothing, after all – if the blade isn’t straight, it can’t be sharpened. If it can’t be sharpened, it can’t be shaved with – you have a useless blade!

It was to prevent this from happening that people bought multi-razor sets – to cut down on the cost of sharpenings, and also to reduce their frequency to make the blades last as long as possible.

The final reason why multi-razor sets were so popular is because they were considered a status symbol. While anybody could buy two (or more) individual razors, and rotate them day by day or week by week to reduce blade-wear and sharpening, being able to buy a cased, matched set was something that was, in general – on a whole other level. The expense of making a custom case, of lining it in fabric and veneering it in leather, of adding in the fittings that would hold the razors in place, of adding in the hinges, catches, or even locks and keys, all entailed extra time, expense…and therefore – money.

If you were able to afford all that – even for a two-razor set – then it suggested that you were a person of means – a person who could afford a few of the finer things in life – and a person who could justify the expense of buying your own cased set.

Multi-Razor Sets: Buying and How-Tos

As I mentioned before, multi-razor sets don’t really exist these days. A handful of companies still make seven-day luxury sets, but these cost thousands upon thousands of dollars each, and it’s unlikely that most people interested in straight razor shaving would wish to spend that amount of money on such a set, unless it was a real, once-in-a-lifetime splurge.

So if you do want to own such a set, then the only way to get one is either to accumulate the razors yourself, and make the case or box at home (or commission somebody else to make it for you), or to buy one secondhand.

Let’s assume that you want to, and you do. What sorts of things do you need to be aware of?

I already covered most of the details about buying vintage or secondhand razors in my previous posting on razors (see “The Idiot’s Guide to Straight Razor Shaving” that I wrote a few weeks ago), so in this part of the posting, I’ll be discussing other things to keep an eye out for, besides the razors themselves.

Checking the Razors

The first thing you want to do is to check the razors themselves. Now I already covered most of this previously (see the link, above), so I won’t go into it in amazing detail – but suffice to say – you want to be sure that all the razors in the set are identical, and that they are all in functional condition, or can be restored to functional condition.

This is one of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to buying antique razor sets like this – all it takes is one TINY blemish – one crack, one chip, or one set of broken scales – to completely ruin an otherwise pristine set. Once one of those razors is damaged and can’t be repaired, the set loses all its value! Nobody will want it because they can’t use it as intended, and because of that, regardless of how cheap the set is, it’s pointless trying to buy it.

This isn’t something that you want to find out AFTER you’ve bought a set, so make sure you check every single razor with microscopic precision, before dropping any money. Light surface-rust and minor scuffs and damage can be repaired, but major issues like cracked, split or chipped blades, heavy rust that goes deep into the steel, or major damage to the box are all things which are irreparable – the set is now worthless. Don’t buy one of those.

Checking the Box

Assuming that the razors are matched, and functional, without major defects, the next thing to examine is the box, or case which the razors come in. Check for any cracks, major blemishes, broken hinges, broken locks or clasps, damaged fittings, excessive wear or rubbing, split leather, major stains or other damage to the interior linings.

Some of these things can be repaired. Missing keys can be found, or re-cut. Hinges can be tightened and you can find new screws for that. Depending on how original you want the box to be, new fabric for lining the interiors can also be sourced (at the sacrifice of any gold-leaf printing inside the lid), and wooden surfaces can be sanded and re-stained to bring back the shine in the wood.

Brass or other metal fittings such as escutcheons, hinges, lock-plates etc, can be polished or replaced. The leather surfacing can be re-polished with an appropriate leather-polishing wax or stain, and gold edging can be retouched to an extent, with things like gold paint of the right hue (or if you really want to do it properly, you can get actual gold-leaf and do it that way).

While examining any prospective purchase, you need to decide just how much imperfection you’re prepared to tolerate, or how far your repair and restoration skills will stretch. The more you’re willing to compromise, the more sets will become available to you. Finding perfect or near-perfect sets for reasonable prices is very difficult – they’re getting increasingly rare, and the sets which are leftover are often more trouble to restore than they’re worth.

So, What about This Set, Then?

Isn’t it neat?? I picked this up on eBay about a month ago (what with our friend Coronavirus staying around for the foreseeable future, the parcel took forever to get here), and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to add to my collection: An antique, cased pair of matching straight razors!

What is it all Made Of?

This particular set features a wooden case or box, lined with red leather on the outside, bordered in gold leaf, with an interior of blue silk and velvet. The lid also features a nickel silver cartouche in the middle, where the owner’s initials or a date or some-such thing, could be engraved, if desired – a feature which bespeaks the set’s intended role as a gift, or as a significant purchase.

The razors themselves are made of carbon steel, with the original owner’s initials engraved on the blades, and which possess scales made of celluloid plastic. The original eBay listing identified them as bone, but a close look reveals the faux-ivory ‘grain’ pattern, that is so common to so many early celluloid-scaled razors.

Restorations and Repairs

The set didn’t really need much work, once I’d gotten my hands on it – one of the main reasons I bought it. Apart from some polish to hide some marks and bring a bit of colour back to the leather, a bit of metal polishing to the hardware, checking the razors for rust, and then giving them a thorough sharpening, there really wasn’t much to do.

All in all, the set was in excellent condition, barring some minor touch-ups, cleaning and general maintenance. A worthwhile purchase which will only ever increase in value.

Sometimes, you buy stuff secondhand, at auctions, at flea-markets, from collectors’ fairs, and you look at it, and think:

“Gee, it’s nice!…Pity it doesn’t work…”

That was the situation I found myself in when last year, I bought a very nice, antique straight razor with ivory scales. The scales were in decent condition…but the same could not be said for the blade housed within them. Ground almost into nonexistence, and as blunt as the flat side of an axe, no amount of a makeover was ever going to revive the career of this blade…which was a shame, because razors with ivory scales are beautiful..and hard to find.

The good news is that straight razors are very simply constructed, and I was certain that with the right equipment and tools, it would be possible to remove the worn out blade, find another blade from another, trashed razor, and replace it.

Fortunately, cheap, broken razors are all over the place, and earlier this year, I stumbled across a perfect candidate for my project at my local flea-market. For $5.00, I nabbed up a square-point BENGALL in excellent condition…bar the fact that the scales…which I judged to be some kind of celluloid…were literally crumbling to dust.

I tore the broken scales off with pliers, and using a file, I ground off the flange around the top of the pivot pin. I popped out the washer, pulled the whole pin and all the other washers out of the scales, threw the scales away, and started in on the blade, polishing away all the rust and staining – once I installed this blade in the new scales, this would be impossible to do, so it had to be done now.

The next step was more delicate: Removing the worn out blade from the ivory scales:

I taped the ivory, and then set in with a file to grind down as much metal as possible. I peeled off the now paper-thin washer that held the pin in place, and with a punch and hammer, I drove the pin out through the scales and blade. This loosened everything up enough to swivel the scale out of the way, drop the pin out, and remove the blade, all at once.

Unfortunately, the ivory, being as old as it is, was more fragile than I had anticipated…which is saying a lot, because the ivory was already wafer-thin and delicate as hell! As I half-expected, the ivory split across the holes drilled for the pins. Apparently, restoring this razor was going to be a bit more challenging than I had first hoped.

Simply gluing the ivory back together would never work – it would have to be reinforced. I found the thinnest strips of steel sheeting that I could find – barely thicker than tin-foil – and cut out rectangular strips which I could use to glue the ivory onto, and then glue that back onto the main body of the scales.

One benefit of the steel strips being so thin is that they’re very easy to cut with ordinary scissors – or fold, or tear…or even punch holes in! So I punched two holes in the strips so that they could still hold the ivory together, while having somewhere for the pin to go through.

I glued everything back together and left it overnight to set. The next step was relatively easy: Putting the razor back together, with the working, replacement blade.

To prevent wear, friction and jamming, razor-blades are inserted into straight razors very carefully in the following manner:

First: A washer or collar goes onto the pin. The head of the pin is “peened” or hammered flat so that it flares out at the end – this stops the collar from dropping off.

Next, the collared pin is fed through one hole in the scales. Another washer is dropped in on the other side, so that the scale is sandwiched between two washers. The razor blade is then dropped in on top of this, and a third washer is added on top of that. This means that the razor is always sliding against smooth metal – not against the body of the scales, which could damage them, cause friction, or jamming.

The other half of the scales is fed onto the pin through another pin-hole, and then a fourth washer is popped in on top of that, when the pin comes out the other side.

So far, so good. I set it all up and left it to dry overnight.

In the morning when the epoxy glue had hardened and the steel strips and ivory had all been bound firmly to the body of the scales which they had broken off from, it was time to do the last step of the reassembly process: Affixing the blade permanently to the scales.

Traditionally, this is done by filing down the head of the pin until it isn’t more than two or three milimeters above the top of the scale. With the collar or washer in place to provide protection, the head of the pin is – once again – peened over.

This is where I really was rather worried – peening the pin would mean putting the razor on my jeweler’s anvil, lining it up, and then belting the top of the pin with my ballpeen hammer to flatten out the head and mushroom the edge over the hole and washer, to keep everything in place.

Normally, this is easy – hold it still – and literally hit the nail on the head. Or it would be easy, if I wasn’t trying to fix a razor with fragile, brittle, antique ivory scales…

I had serious misgivings about whether the ivory would be able to withstand the shock of the hammer-strikes, but in the end, my fears were unfounded. That said – peening the top of the pin enough to hold the razor together, and stop the collar from popping out – took considerably more effort than I had anticipated – and I was hammering away at it for quite a while!

In the end, the results speak for themselves. The final touches were a bit of filing and sanding to clean up the glue and ivory, and of course – a very, very thorough honing and sharpening, to get the blade back up to snuff…

The results aren’t perfect, but the razor is intact, functional, elegant, and has a rustic, vintage charm to it. The razor swings smoothly on the pin and the scales have held together admirably, considering what’s been done to them. The blade opens and closes flawlessly, and is perfectly centered, preventing any possibility of the edge of the blade striking the scales – which is a huge pain in the ass, because it would indicate manufacturing faults – none of which exist here!

A beautifully polished, sharpened blade has been given a new home, and a pair of creamy-coloured ivory scales have been given a new lease on life.

In this final photograph, you can see just how dramatic the difference is between the two blades – the original German one, made in Solingen (on the left), and the replacement Bengall one, made in Sheffield, (installed between the ivory scales, on the right).

The installation of the new blade was both easier, and more difficult, than I had initially expected it to be. Easier, because the steps required to make it happen were not really that difficult to execute, but also more difficult, because of the unexpected steps that had to be taken, over the course of the refurbishment.

Thanks for reading my latest restoration project! I hope you enjoyed it and will return again soon. Fixing antiques and breathing new life into them has always been one of my big hobbies. This isn’t my first antique restoration, and certainly won’t be my last – but it is my first restoration of an antique straight razor! Despite the setbacks, I think we can confidently call this a success.

Here, you can see the completed razor alongside the two other ivory-scaled razors in my collection…