Polishing tip

Just thought I'd share this:

Suppose you have a blade with very faint scratch lines, but you don't want to start sanding.

Take a coticule or belgian blue stone (for some reason, the blue worked best for me). Raise a thick slurry, but not so thick that it is mud.
Then take a piece of cloth and wet it a bit. It should just be moist, not dripping.
Wrap it around your finger and rub it in the slurry.

You can now polish the blade and get rid of faint scratches without having to sand or worry about damaging the etching or things like that.
It also works great it you hold the cloth between thumb and index finger, and then rub the blade between them.

Will this also work on staining/water marks?

Great idea going to give it a try

That is a great idea! Since you said this removes faint scratches, I gather it's faster than MAAS?

how do you raise a slurry with a coticule?

You can also get some polishing rouge-vorneux which is designed to remove scratches from all types of metal and work it on the blade with a cloth or dremmel and it will do the same. You can get the stuff in the tool shop on Timezone.com. It comes as a block. just crumble off a piece add water and voila.

Yeah....but this is a PERFECT excuse to get the Belgian!

I'm in!

-whatever

=Lou

The opposite is also true. Which is how I got the idea.
I was creating a bevel on the 1K Norton and there was a lot of slurry.

So I too a piece of cloth and wiped the blade clean with moderate pressure... :eek:
That was how the scratches got there. With the Belgian slurry I got them out without having to redo any of the sanding / polishing.

I figured this out years ago, way before I'd ever heard of lapping stones. While rehabilitating some old arkansas stones on dry sandpaper, I saved the stone dust in a little baby-food jar and later decided to try it out polishing some metal before I blued it. I guess the moral of the story is to do some dry lapping and save the dust before you go on to wet lapping your hones.