Thread: john barber restored with paua scales

heres a john barber, the owner wanted paua scales and decided on restoring the blade as well. here are the before pics.....
lots of heavy pitting on the backside and a decent amount of honewear to address.

here are the after pics with blade reground, new scales fabricated and installed, honed/stropped to shave ready. awesome blade, was a pleasure to work with! as you can see I didn't remove every blemish, I tried to preserve the original geometry and lines as possible. I tightened up the honewear on the spine and cutting edge by trying to only remove metal from the blade faces. my 8" contact wheel on the belt grinder fit so well that with a little rocking it produced a nice clean hollow that took out 99.9% of the pitting and didn't change things appreciably. I was very concerned with the pitting around the stampings on the tang, front and back but again the majority was able to be removed without losing those precious hallmarks! one layer of tape used during honing just to keep that spine looking smooth.

Nice, clean workmanship, as usual! Old Barber would be rolling over in his grave!

this is just a little detail on the wedge. with the blade in the closed position the barbers notch made the space between wedge and blade tip a little bigger than I wanted. when closing I marked it out so that the tip was as close as I was comfortable with to the wedge and then cut a radius into the wedge to make room for the tip and allowing a tighter gap in the closed position. these pics are just to show that you don't always need to use a tool in the straight forward direction you might feel inclined to. by adjusting the plane/direction of approach you can create a variety of radii using a single tool with a fixed radius. im showing this simple example as a reference point but it can hold true for many tools, including a belt grinder. say you only have one size contact wheel at your disposal but you have a design for a blade or restoration of a blade with a larger radius grind/less degree of hollow. you may be an artist with the grinder but a lot of us are not, so this is a way around that. instead of the straight forward approach with blade perpendicular to the wheel you can skew it to the path of the wheel and doing so lessens the degree of hollow. something to experiment with but as always caution needs to be exercised and safety comes first.

Beautiful! I have the exact same John Barber blade that I am working on right now...and now I have some pics to show me what to 'reach for'! Stellar job as always my friend!!!

I have to ask myself -

- would the original grinder be happy that you re-ground his work?
- would the scale maker have approved of the scales?
- would the wedge maker have taken that amount of care about the fitting?

I think the answers would be

- yes, because some fools screwed his work up.
- yes, why wasn't this stuff available when I was around?
- no.

A fantastic restore. There's enough original black celluloid still in circulation to keep everyone happy.

This came out great Silverloaf very nice re-suit for the old boy
I also like to make tight wedge clearances usually, it makes it look more fit for purpose rather than just generic mass produced scale shape on different blades

I also use my half round bastard for rough scale shaping before going to the finer files before the 120 grit and upwards paper starts

job well done

Awesome work, as well as beautiful razor !!

Originally Posted by UKRob

I have to ask myself -

- would the original grinder be happy that you re-ground his work?
- would the scale maker have approved of the scales?
- would the wedge maker have taken that amount of care about the fitting?

I think the answers would be

- yes, because some fools screwed his work up.
- yes, why wasn't this stuff available when I was around?
- no.

A fantastic restore. There's enough original black celluloid still in circulation to keep everyone happy.

hahaha, thought that was going the other way when I started reading! new life without losing historical value is a hard balance beam to walk! I definitely was highly conscious of preserving the geometry that the original grinder worked hard to perfect, but the scale makers can eat my paua dust! kidding, I do love the paua and it is what the owner wanted, but I would have loved it just as much with either new horn scales or putting effort into repairing and restoring the originals as well

Tidy, Very nice an discreet workmanship. Like it a lot