Description
Coming in at ~40 grams with a “shorty” cutting length, Dovo’s Barbarossa 105803513 is a straight razor featuring the same grind profile as any common type 5/8″ full hollow round head Solingen modern, minus ~2-2.5cm of cutting length (and its associative weight). The tortoise themed resin scales have been shortened accordingly, and appropriately match the Spanish head style.
File jimps (the little ridges) are present upon the underside of the tang (the part you hold while shaving) to aid in your handling.
This is a “shoulderless” razor, which is something The Superior Shave’s proprietor generally prefers for its slightly better handling upon a strop and a whetstone (there’s no little secondary ridge present to avoid).
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“Shave Ready”?
If you elect for the factory edge, you’ll receive your razor exactly as its manufacturers intended…pretty simple!
If you elect for The Superior Shave to further hone your razor, your Barbarossa will be delivered to you Guaranteed Shave Ready! The Superior Shave hones via a method best coined (by the old Thiers-Issard director) as “the opposite of tape“, where the hones’ shapes cater to performance and little else; you begin with your coarsest stone that’s shaped as the smallest imaginary wheel, and you progress to finer abrasives that are shaped as larger wheels, thus sharpening the bevel from the spine toward the actual edge, and leaving a *thin*, concave edge first and foremost.
At one time, years ago, natural stones were used for the establishing and refining of a bevel. But the lapidaries necessary for such extremely refined stones no longer exist, to say nothing of sourcing the strata itself from Earth. So today, Dovo uses a pair of manmade, convex spinning discs to establish their bevels, and thereafter refines with bench stones hand shape to be mildly convex, before finishing on a pasted strop. The spinning discs are coarser, and have a shorter effective diameter, while the bench stones are finer, and have much longer effective diameters. Thus, the bevels are indeed concave, same as ever.
But the steel itself can withstand much more concaving than practical today at any factory, with no negative effects for the longevity of your razor, so long as you keep exclusively to shaving with it, keeping a low spine angle, and keeping skin well stretched and lathered; for its intended job, concaving a razor bevel toward its metallurgical limits only benefits the shaver. If you intend to use your razor at an angle outside of normal shaving work or upon a surface unlike a well lathered and stretched beard, however, a flat or even a convex bevel will better endure such odd usage of these tools.
There is no wrong or right choice for factory edge/further honed, but please do not believe all factory edges are never ‘Shave Ready’ – that is an absurd, yet common, belief. It is certainly the intention of Dovo when producing the razor that you to only need strop (after wiping off the factory oil!) just prior to shaving to receive a terrific shave. Thanks for reading this, and happy shaving!
