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I've wanted a hot lather machine ever since I was a kid. My dad had a Sunbeam (or a Schick, I can't remember which) latherizer that accepted a can of shaving cream, and when you pressed the button on the top, out came hot lather. It was a miracle of 1970s technology. I can still remember him pumping me out a handful of hot lather -- the smell of the lime foam haunts me to this day -- and thinking that a hot lather machine was just about the coolest mantraption you could possibly imagine.

Well, now I finally have my own hot lather machine. A used Campbell Latherking with the charcoal finish, in cherry condition. The Cadillac of lather machines. The workhorse found in every upscale barbershop and quite a few downscale ones as well. The king of lathers and the lather of kings. The Latherking.

This electro-mechanical beast has been around since 1939, and the really old ones were all-chrome, which must have been bitchin'. Mine is a more recent version, though it could be twenty years old for all I know. You can still buy these things new, though Classic Shaving, from whose website I purloined the pic, has quit carrying the Latherking due to "an unacceptably high incidence of defective Campbell LatherKing machines".

That may be so, but I've seen these machines in service at lots of barbershops including the Truefitt & Hill shop at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and just a few weeks ago when I was there, the Truefitt barbers were all extolling the virtues of the Latherking and urging me to pick one up for myself. They use Truefitt's shaving cream in their Latherking for all the straight razor shaves performed in their barbershop, and last summer when I got one there, and they say they've never had a problem with it.

My Latherking looks almost brand new -- I don't think it's seen any time in a professional barbershop, because every Latherking I've ever seen in the trenches, including the one I saw at the barbershop (different place from the one I went to a few weeks ago where the old Italian barber told me to shave with a dulled Bic and Noxzema -- by the way, nice job, Brettmeister General, actually giving this crazy rig a go -- you're a better man than I am, Charlie Shavegeek) today when I went in for a "trim" (i.e. a full-blown haircut, which is what I get every time I ask for "just a trim" no matter what barber I go to -- is it a pride thing with these guys? That if they don't chop a noticeable amount of mane they're somehow not doing their job?) are caked with crud and perma-dried lather scum. My Latherking is most likely the equivalent of the barely-scratched vintage guitar that's never actually been gigged with, just barre-chorded in a succession of bedrooms and basements.

The Latherking is an ingenious device. You pour a mixture of water and your favorite shaving cream in the reservoir tank, and then when you press the button, an electric motor spins a paddle and whips the water/cream solution into a thick lather which then gets pumped through a heated tunnel before emerging as a hot white larval mound into your hand. You keep the Latherking plugged in all the time, and it rewards you with instant hot and fresh lather on demand.

Sure, it's overkill for one guy shaving at home in his boxer shorts. The Latherking was designed for continuous duty in a barbershop, with three or four barbers all going to the well for hot lather all day long. It's built for gangbanging, not a quickie. But overkill is what being a shavegeek's all about. You don't need a Latherking any more than you need a hundred-dollar brush. As long as you wet your face with hot water for a few minutes, whether in the shower or at the sink before a shave, your whiskers are as soft and shave-ready as they're ever going to get. Hot lather's about hedonism, not improvement. It just feels good on your puss. That's it. If it takes a motor-driven machine to make this happen, then all the better.

Right out of the box, the Latherking reminded me of every vintage guitar amp and Leslie rotating organ speaker I ever bought and then spent the rest of the day cleaning up and restoring to good working order. It's an old, simple, crude contraption that smells old in the best possible way, like an old Lionel train set. I stripped it apart, cleaned everything with a toothbrush and warm water, and put it all back together looking good as new. Then I went about figuring out what to feed this thing.

Campbell, the maker of the Latherking, sells a liquid soap solution you're supposed to use to make lather, but everyone who owns a Latherking says it sucks. Apparently, you can get much better lather by using a mixture of traditional English-type shaving cream and water -- the unofficial recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of cream mixed with 8 ounces of water. Everyone's got their own special formula, with some guys adding a few drops of glycerin for extra lube, and other guys mixing a traditional cream with a liquid shaving solution like Lucky Tiger. The underrated Portuguese shaving cream Musgo Real is also said to be spectacular when pumped out of a Latherking, though some say you shouldn't use creams with lanolin because it gums up the works. I love all the do this/don't do this lore that surrounds the Latherking. I know I'm going to have fun with a vintage fixerup if it has this kind of hazy, unfocused lore. There's no PDF manual to download from a web site, because there's no web site. Just some low-rez scans of Xeroxed diagrams, passed on from geek to geek. Beautiful.

I decided to try keeping it simple the first time out. Two tsps of Trumper's Violet to eight ounces of water, stirred until it was a purplish concotion and then fill 'er up. They say you need to leave the Latherking plugged in for at least an hour for the heating element to hit its stride, so I let the machine warm up for an hour and then gave it a push.

Nothing.

Then a spurt of thin lather, and then nothing again, despite the motor's constant whine. I held the button down and the Latherking made a racket, but not hot lather. Or rather, it didn't make any hot lather I would consider shaving with. What came out of the spout, in spasmodic fashion, was warm, watery spew. So I lathered in the usual way, with Nancy Boy shaving cream and my vintage silvertip Simpson's Wee Scot brush, and got a fine, though fully manual shave.

I'll futz with the Latherking some more tomorrow. I don't know why I'm so intrigued by this thing, because I love using a good brush to make the lather, especially this vintage Wee Scot. But the Latherking has been my Moby Dick for some time now, and I need to harpoon its fat motorized ass before I'm done with all this.