Description
“Handmade in France”
Made by hand (and uniquely so), the Thiers-Issard brand is, in this one opinion, the most hollow ground and flexible razor left in production today. They’ve produced straight razors for nearly 100 years in Thiers, France, with traditional methods confined to this most special of nations.
The 889 Wolf and Sheep is an ultra premium model Thiers-Issard razor, featuring the traditional and highly skilled French point in a 6/8″ size that has a tremendously thin extra hollow grind, and is supplied with a tan-colored soft vegetable-tanned leather sheath.
Scales are ram’s horn and will of course each be quite individual, but thankfully here at TSS you get to pick your piece from pictures of the actual stock (choke on that, Amazon buyers!) We have found, over the course of eleven plus years doing it this way, that it became all too easy to predict which piece would sell first when all were priced identically – this indicates demand is unequal once you make individual pics, and that those wanting the obvious hotties in the club should pay more, while those accepting the poor dregs of society should pay less.
This stock is exceptionally well produced and emblematic of the premium razor on the world stage that Thiers-Issard absolutely deserves to be designated.
The laser-engraved inlay mentions “Sheffield Silver Steel”, but that doesn’t mean that this physical blank of raw steel comes from Sheffield, England. It does not matter from the cheapest to the most costly place where raw untempered steel comes from; what matters is the formulation, and how it is forged, tempered, and ground. Cheap Pakistani razors on the bad vendor sites love touting “Japanese steel” to fool some buyers, but they’re only (truthfully) referring to the country that first originated the recipe…you can rest assured the physical steel itself did not come from Japan, because there’s no reason to add that overhead.
The pinning on the horn’s nice and tight, but *always be mindful with horn bone or timber* to guide your razor’s toe in to the scales by sight and careful guidance each and every time the action is performed. Bone, timber, and especially horn love to move, and that’s a fact ordained by nature that cannot be legislated or manufactured away!
“Shave Ready”?
If you elect for the factory edge (= do nothing, no note needed @ checkout), you’ll receive your razor exactly as its manufacturers intended…pretty simple!
If you elect for The Superior Shave to further hone your razor [plz add “note to vendor” @ checkout], your razor 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 shaped like larger wheels, thus honing from the spine toward the actual edge, leaving a *thin*, concave edge first and foremost.
The convex honing methods were used at Thiers-Issard for many years (they’re the ones that told me about it in the first place ~2010), though [as you can see in the video at top] today as the natural stone convex wheels once used are now commercially deceased, they use 5 pairs of ~flat discs to establish a cutting edge which is then ultimately refined with a dual-grit pasted strop. While I’ve tremendous respect for Thiers-Issard’s method and believe many people will love its shave straight out of the box, if you don’t mind more visual queues of honing, for my own face I prefer the concaved edge, and thus that is how I hone your razor when requested. If a commercial wheel fine and slow enough to establish a concaved bevel still existed, I believe they’d probably still use one.
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. Their intention is certainly for you to only need to strop the new razor (after wiping off the factory oil) prior to shaving to receive a terrific shave. Thanks for reading this, and happy shaving!
