What I would personally do with that is have a contrasting polish done between the faces and the spine and set in in a nice piece of chocolate brown horn with period washers, preferably, and a new lead wedge.
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What I would personally do with that is have a contrasting polish done between the faces and the spine and set in in a nice piece of chocolate brown horn with period washers, preferably, and a new lead wedge.
Ummmmmmmmm
It hasn't been Concaved :) "Final Grind"
Look at the one in Jimmy's link and search out the other's they normally have been hollow ground this one hasn't
Now that is a quandary isn't it :p is it rather rare, or is it just another unfinished blank :hmmm:
I know it is sacrilege, but you could probably send that to any number of custom makers and have the grinding tweaked if you really wanted. It's a shame he didn't measure the spine with a caliper and the height with a caliper at front middle and heel. Just curious how the geometry is currently set up.
Ahhhhhh,,, why sacrilege ??? that is exactly what these were made for
But now you tossed in almost $100 to the price tag, and have to accept that the final outcome will probably NOT be 10/8
and you are basically spending (at this point in time) $430 on a Tool Steel blank for the W&B stamp
Or $430 for a piece of $5 steel :p
If you look close at the pics you can also see the flaws in the steel, that were probably never planned on being left there after final grinding...
Just putting this out on the table to get people thinking
It's not a common item... It's a real shame someone who didn't know what they were doing got to mess with it. It would have been nice to see how it was packaged initially. But yeah, I suppose this would get its trip across the giant wheel and then get the wire knocked off on a charnley before it went through other processes. Does anyone have a formal measurement of this thing anyway? If it is a true wedge and the geometry is not nuts, I suppose you could freehand it like a knife and leave it as is, though it might not be a lovely thing to shave with without any depression at that size.
The big thing about those supermassive sheffields is they need to be designed with some finesse to shave comfortably. Like my wostenholm you did is swooping and has a concave nature designed into it so it handles smaller than it really is. Joseph rodgers saw fit to give the giant blade I have a tang the size of a normal solingen blade to improve balance and it works well (at least with my big hands, smaller hands probably not so much), it all has to be in balance. There are a few with thumb notches that work well.
My theory is that these "Blanks" were never meant to be sold, but rather to be used for training purposes of the new apprentice grinders employed by the company to practice learning the craft on. I just can't feature these blades stamped this way as ever having been retailed "side by side" in a display case next to normally stamped wares. Somehow some of these blanks ended up in storage and in private collections over the years and then found their way out into the general marketplace. Some have remained pristine...i.e. never 'worked'... and some have been finished, or ground, by craftsman over the years. :shrug:
Huh... $695 with lots of time left.
Given the fact that it is a huge piece of wade and butcher steel, I expected it to climb.