Thread: Kamijo Yukio, revealing the secrets of steel

Yess...the whole blade is made out of one piece of steel...as far as I know none of the old masters used more then one piece of steel for western type razors...

Those Iwasakis look stunning @mainaman. Maybe I'll polish a bit more to see if I missed something... I doubt it, but it doesn't hurt trying. Not like I'm gonna make them hollow with Uchigumori in this lifetime

Cotiga, these two actually belong to two different people, so I'm not THAT lucky For me though, one is enough LOL... maybe. I know that Tamahagane Iwasaki too well, great little kami that one!

Ah so one of these is actualy my friend's Raso's razor and the little kamisory in tamahagane from my pictures is also his sent for honing.
The rest are part of my personal collection...I am still looking for one Kamijo like yours and a Kamijo hollow ground razor...and my own tamahagane kamisori and that would be about all I need

Huge thanks to Cotiga, for sending me this (rather large) piece of Koma nagura. It will greatly help the polishing project, I'm sure.

So far I've jumped from 1K to Suita, which is too much of a jump, as I've come to realize (especially considering how hard these razors are). Koma should help overcome the issue and hopefully my polish will look a lot better.

Tokiwa RAZOR,
Acid treatment appears "hamon"

Originally Posted by Srdjan

This is exactly the type of response I was looking for, with lots of pictures and explanations. Thank you, Cotiga!

I actually started polishing with stones to reveal the quenching line, because I know some of them were quenched like swords and that just looks awesome. Still, these are in fantastic shape and quite special.

Stefan, I actually don't think this is iron anymore, having rubbed it with at least 5 different stones. It's not as soft as iron on a kamisori. Probably DH, as you said.

I've done a few with stones also & some have that anomaly near the tang. I always thought that it was because it was at the end of the polishing stroke & was simply receiving less pressure or maybe some consequence of the heat treat

I did one kamijyo/Iwa that had no hamon at all. It was 3/8 or 4/8. Polished up like a western razor. On the soft side as you mention some can be.

Really interesting thread. Beautiful razors and great work. I’m curios though, the blades were cleaned up by hand just with nagura stones? I’ve got some scratches on my blade that could use a cleaning and maybe I could do it myself with those!

Acid treatment appears "hamon"
上條作(上條幸夫)=Kamijo Yukio RAZOR 6/8"
Tokiwa Razor 13/16"

That's an interesting koma. Haven't seen the grade stamp (the one above the koma stamp) before. Can anyone elaborate?

Very interesting thread btw.

上級 - jōkyū is the grade apparently...meaning...Advanced?? Feels almost like there's a Kanji missing there.

I never really paid attention to it, but it sure is uncommon. This is not some magical Koma. It's hard and full of inclusions (black dots - pyrite crystals). The layer it was cut from wasn't great. It still works as expected, just gotta be careful...