I just received the pre-production prototype (or, I imagine one of the pre-production prototypes) of Rockwell’s Model T razor. I will certainly shave with it tomorrow, but I thought you might be interested in some of my immediate responses.
One word: skookum… and precise. Two words: skookum and precise… and hefty. Three words…
It feels quite hefty and the mechanism is eerily smooth; the feeling is exactly that of adjusting a (heavy) micrometer. The adjustment is easily changed with the doors closed, and moving the adjustment dial has the same extreme smoothness and feel of precision as the door operation. Oddly (to me) the adjustment dial has the numbers increasing to the left, instead of to the right, as I expect. That is, if you look down on the razor from the top, the adjustment numbers increase as you turn the adjustment dial counter-clockwise, not clockwise (which is what I expected). Turn the dial to the right to make the numbers under the pointer increase. It feels wrong to me, but I would imagine it feels right to 50% of people—or perhaps only to the 10% who are left-handed.
In fairness, this “increasing as you turn the dial to the right” implementation is the same as on the Gillette Fat Boy, but the Progress (and the Apollo Mikron) are the opposite: the setting numbers increase as you turn the dial to the left—that is, the larger numbers are on the right as you look at the dial. The “increasing as you move to the right (by turning dial to the left)” implementation makes sense to me, but I’ve been conditioned by decades of looking at the x-axis, on which values increase as you move right.
The Gillette Fat Boy is 79g (including blade) and the Model T prototype is 110g (also including blade). So the heft is definitely there.
The design is consistent with machine/tool aesthetics: no frippery, no nonsense. The smooth portion of the handle above the adjustment knob feels too long to me, and I would like it if the adjustment knob were a little larger in diameter than the handle proper, or perhaps just had a different knurling pattern. That, I imagine, is (merely) a personal preference.
I’ll be shaving with it tomorrow morning, but the smooth precision of the action is already quite impressive. Think Swiss bank-vault doors—that sort of thing.
Filed under: Shaving
