1820's Greaves for comission.
The first restoration I've done for someone that's not me. :)
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I did some minor blade and scale cleanup before I took these pictures. The scales were really in good shape, though they had a fair bit of grunge on them, as most razors do when they're almost 200 years old.
My goal was to find a pleasing balance between visible wear and clean & usable. Basically, I wanted to turn up the contrast. Make the clean parts cleaner and the rough parts sturdier.
To that end, the first step was getting it apart without damaging any of the original bits.
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The steel support collar there with the missing piece was like that to begin with -- those support washers were never made for looks! You can see that the steel collars from the point have a lot less oxidation on them because they were kept away from water.
If you right click and zoom in, you can see that the pivot pin got chewed up by the nail-hole in the tang.
To get the collars off cleanly, I used a tiny Dremel burr designed for engraving to carefully make a center divot as a guide, then used the drill press and a 1/16th bit to drill down to below the level of the washers. Then I stuck that burr tool down in there and very slowly, gently worked it around until the collar came off.
Neat and tidy!
From there it was a whole lot of hand-sanding and buffing. I've grown to really like the buffer, providing I only use it for the final polish. But getting that polish took a lot of the dark out of the stamps, and I wanted the tang and spine to look a lot less shiny and 'clean' than the blade. So I masked off all the shiny parts and used a combination of Dremel 320 grit puffs, then gun bluing, then naval jelly. The end result is a much more matte-finish spine and tang with nice, dark letters.
The blade face was just a hand-sanding progression with a final round of polishing compound on the buffer.
For the scales, I used a lacquer-based India ink and CA glue to fill the one void and tiny crack, then sanded the worst of the surface delamination off and gave it all a high gloss with the buffer.
And here's the end result. Other than the pin stock and the thrust washers (which you cannot see), it's all original!
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(And yes, lurking under the years of grime was a lovely bit of streaked black horn. I'm pretty sure the original scale treatment dyed them solid black, but I thought the streak looked awesome.)
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