One of my hobbies is restoring and then using old straight razors.You didn't expect a wood carver to use an electric or one of those multi blade razors did you?
I got this old York razor along with 26 others recently. The blade wasn't in bad shape but the scales were awful. Now most razors are hollow ground equally on both sides of the blade. This one isn't. On one side it's nearly flat ground and the other side is hollow. This follows in the tradition of Japanese razors which are called Kamisoris. So with that in mind I restored the blade keeping it a satin finish instead of a mirror finish as the Japanese blades are done and carved a set of scales to resemble the handle on a Samurai sword, mimicking the wrappings they used.
The wood is Satinwood, finished with two coats of CA and then a poly. The gold which imitates the cap and hilt sections is 23K German Patent Gold.
I also had to make one, and modify another chisel to finish the carvings which you can see in the photo where I'm starting to rough out the scales.
Once honed up and stropped this piece shaves incredibly well.
The script on the blade reads York Razor,, registered 1850...