The Missing Link?
The Missing Link?
Place of manufacture can matter, in that certain techniques are mainly used in one place or another. An example of that is the blade I shaved with this morning, a gold-tinted Gillette Thin that says Made in France (for the US market) and dated K-1, right after Gillette closed its U.S. plant. Importantly, it also has US patent 3829969 on the blade. This patent talks about sputtering two kinds of metal (often Chrome and Platinum) on the edge of the blade to form a surface that improves the edge longevity and becomes a better holder of PTFE, if applied. These blades have a longevity for me of around 5 shaves and appear not to be Stainless. These are the same performance characteristics of the NOS Gillette Bleue Extra, also made in France for a long time, and at least originally, the non-stainless equivalent of the Super Blue Blade. In France, the GBE lost its bluing at some point, and many assumed the blade switched to stainless. I believe that at least through early 2000s GBE that so many bought, the GBE was in fact a non-stainless, worked up PTFE blade. The U.S. made Gillette Thins in the 80's appear to be Stainless, but are not. This non-stainless blade composition was the only real explanation I could think of for the longevity pattern that was longer than a typical non-stainless, but not nearly as long as the best of Gillette France. Some have been skeptical of this theory, but I think this is one more data point that it may be correct.
Re: The Missing Link?
Also of interest is this picture of the U.S. made Thin from four years earlier than the French one. It has three totally different patents showing that the blade was using PTFE and a technique to better bind it to non-stainless blades, in particular. France had different technology, by 1990 at least. The Thin was a tiny part of the production at France, by any means, in 1990. Mid-80s US Made Thin Photos with Patent Numbers- http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread ... Thin-Blade
