Been A While...What Happened?

Friends and Clients,

You may have noticed the seeming absence of new postings over the last 3 months.  Well, I have a note from the teacher - I've been consulting out-of-town for a considerable length of time.  Rest assured that we are preparing some very special things for this holiday season.  Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Ramadan or just enjoy the cold, clear nights of winter, we will have something that will be special to you.  Keep checking our store and ebay, particularly in a couple of weeks, for some very nice things.

Spring Cleaning & Organizing

Been spending quite a lot of time trying to organize my inventory.  Not surprisingly, since I have been in antiques for quite a long time, there are MANY things other than razors that I have.  One thing I am doing that does not sound terribly exciting - but actually is - is creating a computerized inventory of every razor I have.

"So what does that do for me?" you ask.

Well, I'll tell you.  When I am finally done (I am up to around 150 razors in the database now), I will be able to instantly search and location razors by:

• Brand
• Grind
• Scale Material
• Shave Ready/Not Shave Ready
• Blade Size

That should be of GREAT interest to all of you specialists out there.  Now if you are looking for a Wade & Butcher "cleaver" I can tell you how many I have that are shave-ready.  Do you hanker for razors with ivory scales?  I will be able to find our how many I have and exactly what manufacturer made the blade in less than a minute.  Considering that I have nearly 1,000 razors in stock, that is going to be a very interesting database.

Since I do all of this work in the evenings, it will please me greatly to have my two daughters over the summer (part time) assisting me with this project.  While they are somewhat less than enthusiastic about their "summer job," I believe it will teach them the value of hard work...well, I can dream, can't I?

Sales of the diamond slurries and men's shaving products on the new website have been excellent (thank you all!)  I am working on getting some razors on the site.

In the spirit of my spring cleaning, you will find me disposing of some very nice items that are completely unrelated to shaving.  Today I put up a killer collection of working vintage guitar effects pedals.  You should check them out if you play, or if your kids do.

Thanks again for your business and for reading my blog!

John

Hot Tip For My Blog Followers - Buy On Our Website & Pay Less Than On eBay

As a courtesy to our blog followers, we are pricing most of our Premium Diamond Slurries LESS on our website than on our eBay store.  Same product. Same shipping times. Lower prices.

Store Gets New Products & A Makeover!

Just a short posting to announce some changes at our Little Stropper/Vintage Shaving Shoppe store.  We completed (for now) our line of Premium diamond slurry sprays with the addition of the .125 SPD formula.  We also added a package deal - the COMPLETE LINE of sprays PLUS a bottle of SlurryLube for 10% off the cost of the individual products!  This is on top of the deep discounts you get everyday off of our competitor's prices.  If you haven't been to the Store yet, please have a look around!

The New .125 Micron Synthetic Polycrystalline Diamond Slurry Spray Is Here!

FINALLY got my first production batch of .125 Micron SPD Diamond Slurry Spray today!  Now it's on to the bottling and labeling.  The first bottles will ship this week!

NEW Product Coming Later This Week & .25 PCD Off The Charts!

Sales of our .25 Micron Polycrystalline Diamond Slurry spray is exceeding all of our expectations.  We are completely sold out at the moment.  We have placed another order (every lot is made fresh and to our specifications) and we expect to ship more product by next Monday or Tuesday.  After chatting with some of our customers, they are reporting buying this spray because, in the words of one customer "(Little Stropper) diamond sprays are SO much less expensive than competitors, it's hard to justify NOT buying a bottle."  While the .25 Micron PCD spray is the largest single seller, we have had many sales of the entire line of sprays, both in the USA and worldwide.

In response to many requests for an even finer level of honing by our straight razor customers, we will also be introducing next week our .125 Micron Polycrystalline Diamond Slurry Spray.  And even though this formulation costs us nearly three times what we pay for our $12.95 bottles of 1 Micron MCD slurry, we will be keeping the price of this new product low by cutting back on our own profit margins.  The price of this new spray will be only $17.95 per two ounce bottle.  Compare that with competitors such as the one here, selling the cheaper .25 Micron formulation for $33.95.  We will NOT be undersold by any competitor.  If you haven't tried your first bottle, now is a GREAT time to start.

A Hard Particle Is Good To Find: The Diamond Vs. CBN Debate

It is a truism of marketing that when a market-space starts becoming crowded with product, someone is bound to come out with something they claim to be "New & Improved" to attempt to capture greater market share.  You are seeing this happen right now in the razor and knife honing market.  There are quite a few products on the market, including ours, which utilize diamonds as the primary abrasive to perfect your blades.  With the market becoming crowded with various brands of diamond sprays, each using different formulas and quantities of those magic microscopic gems, at least one clever vendor has come out with something new - CBN.

Actually CBN isn't exactly new.  In fact, it has been around since the 1970's.  But what you probably want to know is if it offers any real advantages over the tried and true diamond slurries.  That is the question that this short article will answer. 

It might be useful to start out with a basic knowledge of the stuff. CBN, or Cubic Boron Nitride is a laboratory manufactured material which has the same crystalline structure as diamond.  It is 2nd only to diamond in hardness, which makes it harder than all known metals.

But does it have an advantage over diamond slurries?  Surprisingly it has two, but there is a caveat to this statement, so please read to the end.

In situations with large amounts of friction, diamond, which is nearly 100% carbon, can form an affinity for the carbon in the steel.  This can cause the diamond particles to break down and lose their effectiveness.  This problem does not occur with CBN.  Secondly, diamond suffers from a massive loss in hardness when it gets hot, making it effectively softer than CBN under these conditions.

Sound like a problem, doesn't it?  So how hot does the material have to get to give CBN the advantage?  Pretty toasty, as it turns out.  The metal would have to achieve a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 degrees Fahrenheit) for the performance of diamonds to degrade to an effectiveness below that of CBN.  I don't know how many "X" strokes I can do on a hone or strop in one minute, but I believe that I have a very long way to go before I am going fast enough to generate 1,292 degrees of heat.  Of course, by then my strop would have long since caught fire :-)

Yes, I have taken a moment to poke a bit of fun at the issue, but there is a serious point here.  You, the consumer, are being presented with an ever-increasing array of choices.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  You can get some excellent values and you can also get mislead.  There is no evidence to demonstrate that, all things being equal, CBN cuts faster or in any way performs better than diamond....unless you are working at those very high temperatures or very high levels of friction which create them. You needn't take my word for it; research it for yourself.  Any decent article on the advantages of CBN over diamond will mention heat/friction as the primary factor in its superiority.

That said, I would expect the performance of CBN slurry spray to be no worse than that of diamond sprays - although at $32.95* per 2 oz bottle of CBN vs. $14.95 for the most expensive of our Premium Diamond Slurry Sprays, the price may give you pause.

As I have said countless times - the only way to find what work for you is to try the product.  That is one of the reasons that we keep our prices affordable and you, our prospective customer, armed with the facts.



*Source: chefsknivestogo.com

A Good "Look" At Diamond Slurry Sprays - Avoiding The Deception of Appearances

Gaining an in-depth understanding of superabrasives, including natural and synthetic diamonds, involves years of experience and education well beyond that possessed by the average reader. And it can be somewhat overwhelming to the prospective buyer when they are peppered with Scanning Electron Microscope photos and the output of the myriad other equipment used in the SA chemist's lab - all as proof that a particular seller's product is the best. One could dive deeply into this rich pool of images and data and be lost for weeks.

In this article, however, I wanted to get away from these highly technical arguments for buying these products and discuss something that anyone looking at these products can see just by looking at the bottle. 

When I receive my slurries from the chemist, they are delivered in large clear glass bottles.  Long ago when I first started testing slurry formulas to find the ones that were most effective, I left several of these bottles on the shelf for a couple of weeks when I went away on vacation. When I return to the untouched bottles, I found, to my horror, (particularly in the cases of the 1 and 2 micron formulations) that the liquid in the bottles was crystal clear, with just the smallest amount of off-white powder glazing the bottom!  It looked to me as if there was almost no diamond at all in the formula.  After all, I could see hefty piles of white powder sitting at the bottom of the bottles of my future competitor's products, so I certainly expected to see a similar amount of this magic dust in mine. As I had paid dearly for these slurries, I immediately phoned the chemist who proceeded to further my "education" on superabrasives.

As I have written before, microns are extremely tiny things.  The period at the end of this sentence is 400 to 600 microns across.  This makes a particle the size of one or two microns not only invisible to the naked eye, but also invisible to a powerful light microscope.  In fact, an expensive Electron Microscope called an SEM is needed to see these very small abrasive particles. The chemist, who had over 20 years of experience working with superabrasives, reminded me that, given their size, these tiny particles cannot be seen by visually inspecting a bottle of them in solution.  "The white powder at the bottom of the bottles you saw," he told me, "was another substance or mixture of substances.  Without having a bottle of these products to inspect, I can't tell you what they are, but I CAN tell you what they aren't - diamonds."  He went on to say that there were undoubtedly some diamond particles mixed in with the white stuff, but not necessarily any more than were anywhere else in the bottle. 

This was an important part of my education in superabrasives and I thought I would pass it along to those of you who are thinking of buying these products. When you are considering diamond slurries, your eyes will tell you little to nothing about the contents of the bottle.  The information reminded me of something that Obi Wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker when teaching him the ways of the Force: "Your eyes can deceive you; don't trust them."  It is a good rule of thumb to follow when evaluating diamond slurries.

As I have said it many other pieces on this subject, there is one test and one test alone that counts - using the product.  So if you are interested in really keen blades, I'm afraid you are going to have to buy 'em and try 'em.  I recommend ours. They are up to 35% less expensive than competitive products and they work. Use the product for a full 7 days.  If you aren't satisfied, return the sealed bottle containing the unused portion of the slurry and receive a FULL refund*.  If you have any questions before buying, including which product(s) will work best for you, email us at info@littlestropper.com.


*Refunds made only for products returned with tamper-evident neck seal intact and no other signs of tampering. Refund offer is restricted to ONE bottle of any of our Premium Diamond Slurry Products, one time only. S&H charges cannot be refunded. Refunds will not be made to competitors buying our products for testing or to commercial buyers - in other words, you must be a legitimate consumer to qualify.