Rex Konsul, Slant Adjustable Stainless Steel Double Edge Safety Razor. Made in the USA

You can’t go wrong with the quality of Rex Supply Co. razor. A fantastic investment. The vendor shipped this product quickly.

I saw raving reviews of the Rex Konsul adjustable slant razor on YouTube that proclaimed it as the greatest DE safety ever invented. Having never used a slant razor before, I got curious and ordered one. To put it mildly, it was an extremely underwhelming experience. The machining of this razor gets a B-Minus grade. Not bad, but not up to par with an Alpha Outlaw or Merkur Futur razor to which I give a B-Plus to A-Minus. What is an A or A+? Tatara Muramasa, for instance. Absolutely precision finish, in a class by itself.OK, that is for the looks and finish. How about usability? Terrible. It is very hard to (a) load a blade into the razor, and (b) once loaded, to keep the blade aligned properly, so it is parallel to the bottom part of the razor. The problem is, the upper piece of the razor has posts built into it that are supposed to hold the blade in place, but they are not tall enough, so they stick through the blade only if you press down on the blade and hold it against the upper piece of the razor. Problem is, that makes it very hard to screw in the bottom part of the razor into the upper part. There are a couple of YouTube videos that show some workarounds for how you can overcome the design deficiency.But even after all that, once you load the blade, as you can see from the first image I have uploaded, it is very hard to get the blade to perfectly point in the right direction. As the picture shows, the blade should be positioned turned slightly to the right. Every time I load a blade into the razor, I can’t be putzing with it to get this alignment right, and without the blade properly aligned, it is a very uncomfortable shave.The second picture shows how the razor is without a blade, and you can see that the top piece is far better aligned to the bottom portion of the razor, but frankly, for an expensive razor like the Konsul, this is NOT a very impressive finish.Finally, how is the shave? I have been shaving with DE safety razors and blades for just about 50 years and I have used a few dozens of razors over the years. In all my experience, nothing comes close to a Tatara Muramasa razor with a Feather blade. A WTG pass at a setting of 3, 4 or 5 depending on how tough your beard has and how much of a stubble you have accumulated; a XTG pass at a setting of 3; finally one ATG pass at a setting of either 2 or 1 depending on how sensitive your skin is and the toughness of your hair, and voila! You will have a BBS shave. Nothing else has come close.Honorary mentions: Alpha Outlaw (which is also sold as Executive Shaving in the U.K.) with an Astra blade or a Merkur Future with a Kai blade are excellent. Not up to the Muramasa, but still outstanding. Tatara makes non-adjustable razors which are made in exceptional quality, but they are expensive, and if you’re OK with a fixed razor, the Alpha Outlaw can give you the same shave quality, provided you find a matching blade. This razor comes in two flavors, mild or aggressive, and one of them plus the right blade can match the shave quality that any of the Tatara fixed razors can give you for a lower price. But the Muramasa is in a class all by itself.Bottom line, the Rex razors have a long way to go to reach the precision or workmanship of the other razors I have mentioned above. The Rex is not bad, but the machining is more like "Hey, this is a great job by a handyman!", not a precision CNC-tooled piece of hardware. The difficulty in loading a blade is bad enough, but a razor to be not self-aligning when loaded with a blade is simply inexcusable. Not only the price is not justifiable in my mind, but given its other problems, I would not buy or use a Rex Konsul razor for any price.