Thread: Karl Plümacher all-Dremel restore

I know it's a provocative title, but I wanted to give it a try. I had bought a lot of 10 razors at 55 euros, so I figured I could ruin one. Also, "all-Dremel" is of course a lie, I still did the scales mostly by hand.

I removed some rust and most of the patina with just some polish, after which it looked like this. Bad lighting, the spots were pretty dark in real life.


I started off on the wrong foot, using normal Dremel accessories and making the typical wavy pattern on the blade (no pics of that). Then I found a tutorial on making sanding drums (http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...-tutorial.html) which turned out to be very useful. I managed to reduce the wavy pattern a lot with just a 180 grit sanding drum at 10000 rpm, after which it looked quite shiny already:

I moved up to 1000 grit, but the sanding paper wore out so quickly, I'm not sure how reliable it was. I polished with a Dremel felt wheel and some pretty cheap metal polish.

The sanding drum looked like this after I blew it, but it did not come off while spinning:



I found some free wood, I believe walnut, at a large retailer and cut out the scales and wedge by hand. I had to do the wedge twice, accidentally breaking the first during pinning. After that, I decided to drill larger holes (2mm instead of 1.5mm) in the wedge to prevent it from happening again, which worked just fine. This picture is before lacquering:


During pinning, I protected the scales from the file and hammer with some tape, after having made some scratches and dents on my first rescale. I will be doing this again, it worked well for me


The end result was quite pretty, except for the pinning. I have just received my chasing hammer and the pins look a bit better than on this picture:



Just like brooksie967 (http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...-solingen.html), I found this Karl Plümacher took an exceptionally thin bevel.

Unfortunately, the shave was lousy and it got spots within the 25 minutes I used it. I polished away the spots and will be taking it back to the hones soon. It lacked sharpness, I'm still learning to hone.