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Razor Lemonade: Or, how I restored a badly rusted razor.
In the beginning, I had this:
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With a buffer and a lot of patience I might well have been able to polish it up to a mirror shine with some nasty pits near the toe. Really though, it was never going to be beautiful. Never, ever, ever. The scales are completely destroyed (though I kept them, knowing it would be useful for experiments on translucent horn).
Likewise I had a set of bone scales that had absorbed an incredible amount of rust. They too were unlikely ever to be lovely again.
I thought: why not turn faults into virtues?
I came up with this:
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It isn't sharp yet, I just gave it enough passes on the hone to see how the line would look. (It's going to take a lot of work to get it sharp, being a great big old wedge with some fairly nasty dings).
The pins are peened microfasteners, partly because I wanted the chunky industrial look and partly because I'm also pondering doing custom bone scales and I figured it'd be easier to get these off if I used adjustable screws (even peened).
The blade I attacked with phosphoric acid, a heavily patinated sheet of copper, sulphured salts, water, heat and a novel method for fume bluing.
See, I didn't have any good ways of keeping the acid in the bottom of the container warm. So I had a flash of perverse brilliance.
My computer is water-cooled and has a gigantic radiating tower that vents air upwards. To warm the acid and make sure that the blade got good and acid-vapored, I set my computer to rendering a really intensive 3d scene (one that it would keep doing effectively in perpetuity), set the container on top of the radiator and went to bed.
It worked!
The effect I was after was an extremely mottled patina to match the hideous craters in the blade. It is now pretty much the scariest looking razor I own.
I can hardly wait to shave with it!