#56 J.A. Henckels restoration razor

Hello friends, I want to share with you all my Henckels project razor blade. I got it dirt cheap and I plan on learning how to restore with this one. It is also the first use of the light box I made from the instructions in the wiki section of SRP. Not bad for a first try.

Attachment 68321

Anyhow, I will be reaching out to some of you whom I've seen restore some razors to showroom and shave ready condition. I want to do this as well with this razor.

As you can see, she's not perfect (yet). There is some patina on the blade, slight pitting, and the razor flops down. She is dull, a butter knife is sharper than this, and I will bring this edge back. I know, big goals. That's how I roll.

My first concern is where to start? How do I bring back some shine to this razor? Sandpaper? What grits? Of course wet sanding. Buffing? By hand or machine?

Attachment 68322

The scales look pretty decent and I don't want to tackle re-scaling yet until I'm comfortable with a few other things. I believe there's a new pin near the tang. It doesn't match the other pin. The wedge looks decent.

I am getting closer to straight razor shaving. Although I have never straight shaved myself, I am really interested in working on these blades and trying my hand at restoration.

Wish me luck!

From what I can see, I'd polish and sharpen the blade. Clean and polish the scales. I think I'd be a happy bunny. Nice one.

Please suggest a proper polish. Use cloth or is there a preferred material for polishing and buffing. The edge, I'm going to order some stones and take it from there.

Do some searches on razor restoration, there is LOTS of good info on here.

To start, you may want to try some 2000 grit wet/dry sandpaper with water. Follow that up with some MAAS or Flitz metal polish and see what it looks like. You may want to go back to 1000 grit or lower if there is pitting. Do a lot of reading about it first though, you will save yourself lots of time fixing mistakes later....

For honing, a pretty basic setup would be a 1K stone for setting bevels, and a ~4K and ~8K for the finer honing. The site has a wealth of information of what stones are good for a beginner honing set up too.

Good luck and keep putting up those pics as you progress!

P.S. That should be a sweet shaver :)