Description
We found this tiny Italian cutler near Lake Cuomo at a trip to Bologna, Italy’s famed trade show.
Henbor’s specialized to scissors, in a village in Italy known exactly for that, and from what we’ve seen out of this village you can count on a few things from any Premana-manufactured scissor; a remarkably good cutting edge, grind, and steel temper, and a way of installing the center screw where it takes a notable bit more friction to start moving than to keep them in motion versus the Germans.
They just don’t have the Germans’ fluidity, and I think never will.
But the steel’s wholly terrific, as are the edges, in a way the Pakistani-made efforts (very skilled at grinding, but not so much at tempering procedures) can only dream of; the Henbor scissors we have are bestowed with truly great cutting edges, in fact better than some others we deal with that you’ll know really well already.
Quite the pity, the little company played games, and sent us a huge cache of carbon steel scissors, when I made it damn clear that Americans don’t like carbon steel anything except straight razors even if they live in Nevada and it doesn’t matter a damn bit. It was a first and only buy, and a harsh lesson in dealing with Italians in business, as told to me by the retired operator of Liz Claiborne shoes – they don’t mind sending you what *they want* when you paid for what *you want*, and they’ll feign like that there was a miscommunication of some sort. That’s never happened with the two other Italian companies we’ve done business with, but to hear Mr. Liz Claiborne tell it after I told him about these scissors, he doesn’t buy for a minute that they had any confusion on their end about what I wanted. They just profited more when the scissors are carbon steel, and after the parcel’s landed and they already got their money weeks before by bank wire, they knew damn well I could stomp my feet allll I wished, but me and my little few-thousand-bucks purchase order and tiny website wasn’t going to be burning down their factory or mattering to the good name of their business. We could have had a very fruitful long term relationship, but they chose instead to put a few more hundred bucks in their pocket today.
Sometimes in business, your business partners will treat you like adversaries – I don’t do that, and that’s why I tend to only buy from small Germanics and French, and will never buy Chinese items, because they friggin’ love that schtick. When an Italian shoe making factory tries such stuff and a sharp-eyed buyer from the US is on the premises, the stakes are high enough, and his pockets and volume deep enough, to stop the production/payments in their tracks until they quit playing with their bullshit. For poor little Jarrod, no such luck.
Anyways, they’re still real nice little scissors; pity they are, indeed, carbon steel.
This model is a 4.125″ beard-and-mustache-specific offering, with a Teflon coating applied before grinding the cutting edge. Carbon rather than stainless steel chops down cost by roughly half, but being Teflon-coated (rather than oxidized like Dovo 43454) helps resist oxidation to the point you’ve got to be rather neglectful to have problems (don’t be that guy, though…keep it clean and dry after use and lightly oil it on occasion with a non-food oil such as mineral or clipper oil, though …in fact do this for your stainless scissors, too, as the steel was not named stain-not, now, was it?).
It has two sharp edges with such extremely-fine serration as to be invisible to the naked eye; serrated enough to endure, but too fine for the ‘catch cut’ action of Dovo’s Moustache, which ironically some will characterize as “pulling” the hair…this one sure as sh*t ain’t gonna be called pulling hair by any sane person spinning around the sun but it will also go where you point it a bit quicker than the Dovo, and thus I will characterize it as something for those with skilled hands that just want the absolute best cutting edge all other factors be damned.
This has the best (sharpest) cutting edge in a moustache scissor that I have personally ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot! If you want to steer/hold as you cut, though, you’ll need some other option.
- ~4.125″ (~105mm) Length
- Teflon-coated 56 HRC carbon steel
- Supplied with plastic pouch
- 19 grams
- Handmade in Premana, Italy
