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, such as lead tempering and the use of a single forging die and multiple hammer/reheat/hammer cycles versus the quicker method employed elsewhere where a progressive series of forging dies are used in sequence with just one heating cycle.
The “Le Chatellerault” is an extra full ground special razor, because the molten steel used here was forged in the 20th century for Jacob HOLTZER. The steel was forged back then, and thereafter the tempering/grinding/polishing/laser engraving/sharpening/scaling was done by the Thiers-Issard today. This steel is unique, and must be hollow ground 100% by hand (hollow grinding is hard labor, and all the remaining factories try to find automated ways to do as much of the early hollow grinding steps as they can, but the Chatellerault’s steel requires all the steps to be done the old fashioned way).
Likely in pockets of cutlery of the EU, there are more still opportunities for historic forgings, so it is sort of like buying “whisky with a story”, as I like to call it – this steel is not the Carbonsong C135 of TI’s own creation as on almost every other razor they make. Not quite the same as any other modern forged TI, and so whether that is a good or bad thing is for you to decide, but a collector should have one, I suspect.
Being as the razor is indeed from old forgings, there are always subtle variances from piece to piece, because they didn’t necessarily use the same forging die for each piece, even though they did likely use the same raw blank of steel to smack in to those various dies.
The razor comes with their basic black lambskin pouch, and features scales made from pistachio wood which is farmed in Spain and pre-aged as a ‘blank’ to become what they refer to in the cutlery world as ‘noble wood’, meaning the pieces of wood used to make the scales are larger/thicker than necessary so they can age (exposed to variances of temperature/humidity/air pressure over some months) before commencing woodworking, such that the finished scales’ wood has higher resistance to local environment variances.
Regardless of this, do give your scales the occasional light treat of oil/wax, and always guide any razor with horn, bone, or timber scales in to the handle carefully with your fingertips, as these materials cannot be rendered completely free of natural movement over time. Especially with horn, you never want the scale to dry out, but there is an element of that upkeep with any timber scales, too. There’s always completely manmade scales if you prefer, but it is nice to have a natural material.
Weight of this version of the Chatellerault is approximately sixty-seven grams. TI is known for their excellent pinning work.
“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 Le Chatellerault will be delivered to you Guaranteed Shave Ready! Observe a Chatellerault in action here! 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!
