I bought another stubtail, Warburton Lisbon Cast Steel. Lummus’ comments would seem to date it to between 1772 (when they began marking ‘cast steel’) and around 1800 when ‘Lisbon’ changed to ‘Warburton’. Any comments on age would certainly be welcome!
This razor is not as cosmetically nice shape as my Shepherd, but like the Shepherd it has very little wear on it. It’s a candidate for a better restoration than I’m capable of, so I decided to hone it and give ‘er a shave (tomorrow most likely). I wanted to use tape on the spine because these old razors just don’t look right with shiny spines, so the first job was to measure the bevel angle at the heel and widest portion near the toe. It turned out that the angle is a very normal 17.7 degrees at the heel and 18.2 degrees at the toe, so I went with 1 layer of 1 mil Kapton (2.7 mil total) and added about 1/2 a degree to the existing angle.
The edge had 3 really small chips, some light devil’s spit, and there wasn’t any bevel so a Shapton Glass 500 did the honors of removing the chips and DS, and forming new bevels. The first thing that I noticed is that the steel is hard! Even the Glass Stones cut it fairly slowly, but progress was steady so I just used some slurry on the 500 and kept at it. And the steel is very good too, even at 500 grit the edge was straight and even, a sign of good things to come, and they did. Next was a 1k GS and a 2k GS. After the 2k, I did 10 canvas and 20 leather and did HHT to test for bevel set, and it passed very well with a little extra attention to the hollow area at the heel. A razor that will turn out good HHT at 2k is IMO, a really good one.
Next a 4k GS, a butterscotch Nakayama kiita for a pre-finisher though this stone is quite capable of finishing without another step, but I chose a small Nakayama iro from my trip to visit Alex Gilmore in Sonoma, using thin slurry and finishing with 20 clear water strokes. The HHT was silent root in or out, though the hollow area at the heel could use a bit more attention in the last few mm, but that’s a small job for another day.