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« on: February 05, 2017, 01:31:40 AM »
The Japanese feather disposable straight razor blades, as well as most of the modern razor blades, are laser cut. This allows for a surreal level of precision with modern steels but you may have noticed that these products are also very expensive. I suspect that the tooling required would be a very large outlay for a product with very little volume.
On the other end, world class razors can be made by a smith in a workshop with a good understanding of the steel. The original 303's were made with a tool stamp so it seems likely that the question is of the quality and temper of the tool and the quality and temper of the nib. If there was a great batch followed by a bad batch one of the two seems likely if it is a matter of edge quality of the nib.
I wonder a bit whether tumbling them in a very fine sand in one of the vibrators used for shell casings might not also resolve some of the issues. Finding a media soft enough to polish without being so aggressive as to ruin the point would be trial and error but could probably be done in mass rather than hand working nibs post production.
I have to dig out some of my own polishing media this week to see what is easiest at home. Given the complex curves, and the thin steel I think that the 3m chromium oxide paper from lee valley, powder or stick is likely a pretty decent polish. Flat stones are only good for tip shaping. Diamond grit even at 30k is so much more aggressive I suspect on this still that it will chip out the nibs. I have a 50X scope somewhere in my pile that I will have to dig out as well. If someone here has a USB microscope and decent light it would be nice to get some high-resolution pictures to see what the real starting point is. My 5X monocle isn't good enough to really see what is going on and I'm just guessing by touch.