We know how it goes. Peacefully puttering around on the internet, and boom: You accidentally bought two vintage razors. Earlier this week we looked at one of them, and today we’ll have a peek at the other. The other being a Christy razor.
Christy, like the CURBO, Diamond Edge, and others, were aiming for the low end of the shaving marked. Whereas Gillette and others were offering affordable razors, Christy’s razors were cheap or even free.
The seller had mislabelled this in their classified ad; the seller had it listed as an Gillette. It came in the original box, with a couple of spare blades.
My Christy is a very neat little razor. It is sleek and lightweight, and has a couple of interesting features.
The blade has a unique shape, as can be seen in the pictures. The shape of the blade can be traced to US patent 1,563,724, filed in 1921. The rest of the razor don’t match that patent though, but rather partly matches a 1927 advertisement for the Christy with a ‘massage bar‘. Apart from lacking the massage bar, that is.
The ears and angled cut-outs on the blades matches to bumps on the bottom plate. These bumps acts as both alignment guides and blade stops. Two raised ears on the bottom plate helps guide the plate onto the top cap. The top cap has a tab that is wrapped under it, which both hold the handle and – more importantly – presses the bottom plate up against the top cap. This locks the razor together securely.
The razor also came with two spare blades, wrapped in an old Gillette blade wrapper.
My best guess is that this Christy dates from between 1921 and 1927. But that is mostly based on the patent and the advertisement, so it’s a tenuis guess at best.
While there is nothing wrong with the razor itself – at least nothing that some soap and TLC can’t fix – I’m stuck as far as blades goes. To the best of my knowledge, no one makes Christy blades no more. Nor have I had much luck finding a guide on how to modify other blades to fit.
I see the shape of the blades are specific to the handle but will a standard safety razor blade fit or is this wildly different?
He mentions that at the very end. It sounds like the answer is nope, you can’t really use other blades.
Thank you, I didn’t catch that. That’s too bad because otherwise it’s a neat design and would be interesting to try out.
If I remember later, I can post a comparison of the blade vs other blades like the GEM and a standard DE
I often see people wedging injector blades into things eg. Ender’s, Ronson, etc. but haven’t given it enough thought to guess if there’s a reasonable way to do that here.