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 new “125” Thiers-Issard ‘Le Transatlantique’ is a reboot of an old trademark they’ve held. TI’s founder Pierre Thiers had a sister, Jane Thiers, who was quite invested in her brother’s business and loved travel by sea. In 1914, TI created the ‘Le Transatlantique’ brand, complete with an engraving “Jane” on the back of the tang. Beyond this new/old nomenclature, this is a 6/8″ TI blade with their geography-centric ‘compostelle’ scales, square head, and the “275” denotation for satin-matte surfaces on each side of the blade (“275” = both sides matte, “889” = one side brightly polished, “188” = both sides brightly polished).
This version has full gold gilding on the back of the blade. The weight is approximately forty-seven grams.
File jimps – those little ridges provided for an enhanced grip – are present here upon the underside of the tang. The scale’s wedge – and it *is* a wedge, it is *not* a spacer – is transparent acrylic.
“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 (by denoting this preference in a ‘note to vendor’ at checkout time), your Transatlantique will be delivered to you Guaranteed Shave Ready! See this precise razor being honed below!
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!
