Thread: Restoring blades

When restoring a hollow grind I use wet dry paper, and always sand wet. As mentioned above, starting at 600 grit saves a lot of time!! The key for me is to take my time and do an easy progression:
600-800-1000-1200-1500-2000-Flitz on microfiber
This makes a nice mirror finish, and saves the angles and most markings.
If I am working on nice thick blade like a vintage wedge, then I will use power buffing because I don't have to worry about grinding through the thin edge. I will still usually hand sand the rust and severe corrosion before attacking it with a grinder.

This is a fascinating thread !!....I can't add much Andrew, except that each razor is different
and each restore strategy "has to be reset to zero", at least in my experience.

This means (to me) a varying game-plan but you can't go wrong with a proper clean up
initially to see what you have and how to proceed.

As always, before pics are essential if you want advice on a particular blade.

Sounds too vague ?....Yep !!.... and I make no apologies for being so

I try to keep things simple, so I usually go for a full Micro Mesh treatment, nowadays the final polish tends to be newspaper - also on non-mirror finishes, which tend to be the majority of my polishing jobs. Gives a great final polish shine.

when you guys hand sand, do you go heal to toe? I've been trying to learn to greaseless buff going spine to edge, but I find it very difficult not to do one of 2 things.
Either I can't reach the center of the hollow grind with 4 inch wheels, or I round over the hone wear portion on the spine, and it looks terrible... or of course the dreaded chewing up of the edge in spots.

When I hand sand I go heal to toe, and its also much easier to do that with grease less, but I am continually being told this is wrong... also when going heal to toe, its hard to get it good right at the plunge line/choil area, where the grind meets the shoulder