A small blade safe can hold hundreds of blades and it’s like 4"x3"x3". Makes sense they thought the inside of drywall 5’x3’x1’ would be fine. It can probably hold tens of thousands. Even with a new blade daily that’s decades. And when you tear down the wall you’re dealing with Sheetrock, nails and screws already. All that time would have dulled the incredibly thin blades.
This is all to say: it seems wild but was a decent idea.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/7775973
Hundreds of thousands
yeah I have one that’s a few inches cubed for 6 years now and it’s nowhere near full.
Safety razors with disposable blades were introduced about 120 years ago, at one blade a day that’s a bit less than 45000 blades
Double edged blades dimensions are: 0.1mm x 42.7mm x 22mm for 98.21mm³
45 000 blades would take a volume of 4 419 450mm³ or about 270in³
A regular indoor wall is made of 2x4 and each stud is 14.5 inches apart (16 inches on center). A 2x4 is in truth 1.5" x 3.5" so each inch of height inside the wall is 3.5 x 14.5 x 1 which is 50.75in³
45 000 blades stacked perfectly would therefore use 270 / 50.75 = 5.32 inches of the wall’s height… So even if they didn’t stack perfectly, it’s pretty safe to assume that there’s enough space inside the wall for hundreds of years at one blade a day (especially since old houses usually used true 2x4 and had their studs at 24" on center)
One blade a day?!! Are you a billionaire or something? The acceptable signal to replace the razor is when the pain from the dull blade pulling your hairs makes your eye watery, and then you try to man up for a couple more shaves before accepting defeat and put in a fresh blade.
It’s an exaggeration to show how long it would take to fill a wall
Those old school blades are cheap as chips though.
Also, most people use blades for more than one day’s shave. I think more like 3 - 7, depending on the blade and how picky the shaver (I get more than seven shaves per blade).
Same. I’ve gone 6 weeks on one blade if I was working from home a lot and didn’t have to shave often.
Yep, just trying to show how there’s no way someone fills that wall in their lifetime
Assuming they would use the volume perfectly is a pretty big assumption, it’s likely you wouldn’t even get a tenth of that.
They would fall flat for the most part and I already addressed that in my message but thanks for telling me, you’re just the third one I think.
This was behind the medicine cabinet in my house.
Yeah we had a 1920s house with a metal medicine cabinet above the sink. It had the razor blade slot and yeah they literally fell into the wall between the studs.
Multiple homes I’ve lived in have had these slots in the medicine cabinets lol.
Did they anticipate people not living long enough to care? Or that some biome would form to use the blades as food?
Interesting decisions all around.
Prevents them from being mixes in with general garbage and people cutting themselves when handling such.
Makes sense!
They are very slim. You would really need to shave a lot to see it being full.
I use these blades to shave almost daily. I use approximately 40 each year. I would never be able to fill up a wall with these, not even during 10 lifetimes
Remodeling contractors hate this one trick…
How bad could it be? They’d all be piled up at the bottom of one stud cavity and you know they’re there. If you’re demoing the wall you’re gonna have gloves and a shop vac and a bigass broom and shovel anyway.
Still I got a little blade bank (about the size of those mini soda cans) on Amazon for $7 for my double-edge blades. Last year. And it still has plenty of room in it. Supposedly it holds 300 blades. That’s two blades a week for nearly 3 years. An absurd frequency…I replace my blade every week and I shave my head and they could totally go longer, they’re just so damn cheap.
I think these plastic boxes the blades come in often have a slot for used blades on the bottom. They take up so little space without the paper around them that an entire pack fits into a 1mm slot maybe.
A hole in a steamy bathrooms wall where you dispose wet things full of human skin cells sounds like a mold-hotel.
And if there are kids around, they put everything small enough inside.Wall full of tetanus.
I’ve come across one or two of these doing renovations in homes.
Why were the walls doing renos?
I think this is the first real TIL for me in ages.
Congrats ☺️
For some reason I read th his in the vouce od Dara Ó Brian. “It goes into the waaal.”
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so it’s the graveyard of razorblades?
razorgraves?
Tomb razor.
If I had this in my home, I would draw a face around this “mouth”.
come feed me used blades
I still use safety razors. I get all excited when I’m at a bathroom that I can slip one in the wall.
Safety razors are the best! They are cheap, you can buy a bunch of quality blades for pennies compared to a “Mach 3” or whatever.
Once you learn how to shave with one, there’s no going back.
What’s different about shaving with one as opposed to a regular disposable?
The head isn’t on a hinge so you have to manage the angle yourself
Do they really not make any with a swivel head? That’s a pretty useful feature imo, and certainly would be easy to design for on a safety razor.
I’d say it’s more of a learning curve question. With a swiwel you get good results most of the time but if it doesn’t work as you need there’s nothing to do. With a solid construction you need to learn to manipulate it efficiently but then it’s that you can use it for any shape of skull. TL;DR convenient ≠ better
I’ve literally never once had a swivel head razor that didn’t work.
It really seems like a stretch to make this into a skill issue lol
Yeah, I have the same leg but it doesn’t hurt
Just crazy cheap. I spent probably 5 dollars on shaving last year. That’s using the most expensive blades made.
They also don’t have plastic housings which is nice from a waste perspective
Since I’ve started cleaning my blades I find I don’t have to change them all that often though
My dad’s workplace had something similar in the 1960s-70s. It was a plane hangar that was used by the baggage handlers.
The walls were cinder block so hollow from top to bottom, they would open up the boxes of the mini alcohol bottles that would go on the planes and take handfuls of them out, once the bottles were empty they would dump them down the same hole until they actually filled one up then started on a new one.
That would have been a surprise when that hangar got demolished and that wall opened up.
If they aren’t going to recycle which rarely happens even today that is probably just as good of a solution as landfilling them, those little bottles are littered all over the earth. When they demolish a building they would trash all that debris anyway, but yeah a hilarious find, hundreds of them lol.
