Thread: Crocus finish or Satin?

Here is a video of Werner Breidenbach, one of the best razor grinders in Solingen in all times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p63sYVCLVUk&t=205s

He introdueced me in the usage of the hollow grinding machine and all other steps in razor fabrication. Werner Breidenbach started learning his craftmanship in 1948 and is therefore the oldest master still alive and still working part time for some companies in Solingen.
Beside him only Heribert Wacker worked his whole live as a razor grinder and still does today. He was also one of the last apprentices in razor grinding in the 1950'th. After that time no more razor grinders have been professionally educated. Thanks to schwabenchris for the link to the video.

Regards Peter

Hi Peter,
I thank you for the video and the news that he is alive. this video is kind of my asmr video. I have been probably watching this video more than twice a week for one year. If you happen to see him again say hello from a fan in Istanbul. I wish I could understand german, but by watching this video I started to understand most of it. Everytime the video finishes when he starts to hone the razor I feel a misery and I looked every possible rasiermesser video on youtube to find the remaining part of the video.
This is a good video from sheffield also, I hope you like it.
https://vimeo.com/channels/1383329/2...ref=fb-share&1
mit freundlichen grüßen
Taskin

Hi Taskin,
yeah the video on youtube stops at a certain time and I think it is not an official permitted video. The rights of this film belong to the LVR institute in Solingen. They do sell DVD's of the whole film for about 10 € or so. I think a got a DVD left, so if you like - shoot me a pm. Also if you are interested in getting a razor from Werner Breidenbach - if you don't already own one.
I also plan to publish a seperate thread in the razor column of this forum about the life and work of Werner Breidenbach soon. He knows a lot of the Solingen razor companies from the past and there are many stories to tell.
I visit him frequently and will pass greetings from you next time.

Regards Peter

Never seen that Sheffield video before. Really enjoyed it, thank you for sharing Taskin.

I have always wanted to see the entire Werner Breidenbach video. I sent you a pm Peter. I think it is a great initiative to publish this valuable material Peter. Looking forward to reading the thread.

Hi Peter, I sent you a p.m

I used to work as a polisher for a large dental instrument manufacturer. For the most part depending on the instrument to be polished we were using 'Hard' felt wheels with emery compound for pre-polishing/cutting and green rouge for the final polish. (Occasionally we would use spiral sewn mop wheels for polishing instrument shanks.) This was used for instruments which needed to have curved surfaces and where the inevitable rounding you get with standard felt wheels isn't an issue. However for some instruments, especially periodontal knives, you want very crisp lines defining the bevel planes, which also need to be mirror polished, in which case we would use 'Diamond Hard' felt wheels. These wheels were so dense that when you drop them or knock them together they sound like wood. We would use a diamond tool or a silicon carbide stick to dress the wheel to a certain profile/radius depending on the work. I ended up with dozens of wheels for different jobs.

On one of the periodontal knives I used to have to polish I would make a special wheel which was thin cardboard glued to a steel backing plate. This wheel when charged with compound would give a very true and flat mirror finish.

I'd be interested to try to make and use a lead faced wheel for polishing, I know in watchmaking parts are black polished on a tin lapping plate.

As an aside, in my experience it gets harder to produce a mirror finish the harder the wheel surface becomes. You need to check your work at different angles in the light to make sure all the scratches are gone, a single errant piece of grit embedded in a hard wheel can ruin a job in a second. Soft wheels are easier to create the gloss but always introduce some distortion to the reflection.

Very interesting read, thanks for the addition.
Some questions. What kind of emery do you use on your wheels and what is the green rouge - never heard that? Sounds like a green and red paste in one ...
In the razor cutlery we use either green paste, means chromium oxide for mirror polish, or red powder. The red powder or paste is based on iron oxide and gives a much better mirror polish. It isn't used quite offen these days because the red powder lays down everywhere in the workshop while polishing. In the older days polishing with red iron oxide was called "fox polishing" because of the red color. The tools and the polishers themselfes were covered in red and looked like a (red) fox. That's why the red polishing went out of fashion already in the 1930th/1940ths, when the green paste enters the market.
But with some experience you can clearly see on old razors if they are green or red polished. Also red polished surfaces are more stable. They don't get scratched so easily like green polished surfaces.
I also like to use tripel as a (pre-) polishing powder/paste.

Regards Peter

Originally Posted by hatzicho

Very interesting read, thanks for the addition.
Some questions. What kind of emery do you use on your wheels and what is the green rouge - never heard that? Sounds like a green and red paste in one ...
In the razor cutlery we use either green paste, means chromium oxide for mirror polish, or red powder. The red powder or paste is based on iron oxide and gives a much better mirror polish. It isn't used quite offen these days because the red powder lays down everywhere in the workshop while polishing. In the older days polishing with red iron oxide was called "fox polishing" because of the red color. The tools and the polishers themselfes were covered in red and looked like a (red) fox. That's why the red polishing went out of fashion already in the 1930th/1940ths, when the green paste enters the market.
But with some experience you can clearly see on old razors if they are green or red polished. Also red polished surfaces are more stable. They don't get scratched so easily like green polished surfaces.
I also like to use tripel as a (pre-) polishing powder/paste.

Regards Peter

The emery we used was just a standard grease compound emery, the green rouge is a fine polishing compound designed for the final polishing of stainless steel/chromium plate. Dico is the manufacturer. It's amazing how fast the emery can cut, we would actually use it in conjunction with a felt wheel as a sort of soft grinding medium for some of our instruments. One I used to grind and polish was called an IPC (Interproximal Carver) It looks kind of like a small hockey stick, 10mm long blade, 60 thou wide, tapering from 10 thou at the heel to 5 thou at the tip. We used the emery with a rocking motion to cut down the thickness from the blank and to create a double clamshell cross-section which resulted in a sharp cutting edge around the perimeter. Back to compound, a lot of green compounds used to use chromium oxide but now many contain a mix of chromium oxide and aluminum oxide or just mostly aluminum oxide. I use the Thiers Issard cromox on my strop and it obviously removes metal. Before that I was using the Herold Strop Pastes, the small red and black cakes but they didn't really seem to do much at all. Red rouge, unless I'm mistaken is a bit too soft for use on steel, or at least you would be polishing for a very long time. The crocus compound used on the old Sheffield razors would have contained both red and black iron oxides, giving it a purple color. Black iron oxide, Fe3O4, can be bought in powder form although I'm not sure how fine the particle size is. It is otherwise known as Magnetite. It has a higher Mohs hardness than red rouge and is more suitable for polishing steel afaik but it sounds like you've used the red compound on steel. What are the polishing times like on a razor using red rouge?

Well colors of the ready to use pastes you can buy are vacant these days. The incredients differ from producer to producer, there are green pastes that are much coarser than the normal chromium oxide and so on.
I never use ready to use pastes, I produce all pastes that I use by myself, based on old receptures from grinders and my own experience. You can buy nearly all grinding and polishing powders as pigment.
So chromium oxide green is nearly all the same concerning the average or maximum particle size, that is around 0.3 µm. Concerning the red iron oxid Fe2O3 you can get variable particle sizes between 0.07 µm - which is much finer than chromium oxide - and > 1 µm.
You are correct that the ancient Sheffield polish was a mixture of several iron oxides that was mined as a natural product. It was developped around 1700 by the swedish engineer Christopher Polhem. The Solingen grinder Daniel Peres did a lot of efforts and years of experiments to recreate this polish by mixture of different iron oxides beginning of the 19th century.

Indeed the particles of red iron oxide are not as stable as chromium oxide particles. But that is also part of the trick, the particles getting smaller during polishing and therefore create a more mirror polishing. The problem is, that the surfaces must be very well prepared and nearly already without deeper scratches to use iron oxide. Otherwise you simply polish the scratches - which makes them even more visible on the surface.

As for the time you need for ploshing that is hard to say. If the surface is well prepared you can do the job quite quickly. But it is necessary that the metall surface heats up, therefore a certain pressure is needed. But I found that polishing with iron oxide you don't need so much pressure and time as when you polish with chromium oxide.

Regards Peter

Originally Posted by hatzicho

Well colors of the ready to use pastes you can buy are vacant these days. The incredients differ from producer to producer, there are green pastes that are much coarser than the normal chromium oxide and so on.
I never use ready to use pastes, I produce all pastes that I use by myself, based on old receptures from grinders and my own experience. You can buy nearly all grinding and polishing powders as pigment.
So chromium oxide green is nearly all the same concerning the average or maximum particle size, that is around 0.3 µm. Concerning the red iron oxid Fe2O3 you can get variable particle sizes between 0.07 µm - which is much finer than chromium oxide - and > 1 µm.
You are correct that the ancient Sheffield polish was a mixture of several iron oxides that was mined as a natural product. It was developped around 1700 by the swedish engineer Christopher Polhem. The Solingen grinder Daniel Peres did a lot of efforts and years of experiments to recreate this polish by mixture of different iron oxides beginning of the 19th century.

Indeed the particles of red iron oxide are not as stable as chromium oxide particles. But that is also part of the trick, the particles getting smaller during polishing and therefore create a more mirror polishing. The problem is, that the surfaces must be very well prepared and nearly already without deeper scratches to use iron oxide. Otherwise you simply polish the scratches - which makes them even more visible on the surface.

As for the time you need for ploshing that is hard to say. If the surface is well prepared you can do the job quite quickly. But it is necessary that the metall surface heats up, therefore a certain pressure is needed. But I found that polishing with iron oxide you don't need so much pressure and time as when you polish with chromium oxide.

Regards Peter

Interesting point there at the end about the metal heating up in polishing. Something I've noticed is that when using a coarser polish like an emery you really want the metal to be cool, I've noticed that if you get a lot of heat build up that you get a kind of tearing out of the metal, under a loupe you get these tiny pock marks with a comet tail effect which is very noticeable as you move to finer and finer polishes. But when you get to the fine polishes you want some heat in the work to almost create a burnishing effect. Maybe it's the same smearing but just on such a fine level it seals the metal somehow. I wonder if this is the reason that, at least in my experience, you never see a full mirror finish on full hollow/thin grind razors, that the pressure and heat needed for a nice polish might ruin the temper or flex the blade too much? I think some makers do polish but it is very light and you can still see the very fine lines from the grinding/glazing operations.


Can you share anything about the compounds that you make? I've always wondered how they used to do stuff in the old days. Kind of incredible some of the things you see from then. I have an amateur interest in pocket watches and when you look back to some of the quite old verge-fusee escapement pieces, the level of polish on the steel parts is amazing considering what they had to work with. But then again it seems our forebears were more advanced than we are aware, so much has been lost to history.