Lion Tortoise razor set

[The Topher]

SO I thought I would show you what is going on with the first razors I am cleaning up. They are from LION and are tortoise scaled as they pass the hot needle test. They have worked spines and were covered in rust. I mean covered. SO I have set out to take them back to useable since i like them and they are well on the way. I wanted to remove the scales but I see a crack in one scales end so I am worried about breaking the scales since he has another like this with shattered scales. I have no idea how that happened but it was sad. I could probably do it carefully but I don't want to chance it. They are also full hollows so I have to be careful about metal removal. I think they can go a touch further but not much. I will focus on leveling the surfaces to make a near mirror. You can see the progression below.

Notice you can still see the etching. And the second one has not yet been completed so you can see what it looks like after removing the rust. I will post again when both are done.

[TOB9595]

Thanks for taking us along for the ride.
The pics are most interesting!
Goodness, they are cleaning up mighty nice..
Now for the even tougher part is the detail stuff.
Good luck with these. They are MIGHTY NICE
Tom

[Philadelph]

I love those spines!

[BOGARTUS]

That looks like the dreaded amber celluloid. If it is the rust will be back. The only solution I found was to rescale them.

[crichton]

Holy crap those are nice blades.....they are gonna be real lookers once you're all through Chris!

[JGS]

Wow!...I know believe it is possible to restore blades that would never have seemed possible.

Great work.

[The Topher]

They are tortoise. Passed the pin test. Though one has a crack and since i intend to use them I might buy some tortoise scales and carefully replace these to preserve them.

So you guys want a great tip. As I said before I come from polishing metal. So as you guys have experienced, when you have that sort of rust and you take a dremel to it and polish away with maas it turns black and makes the blade hard to clean. Then when it comes off you have pits. This is because the oxides are harder than the steel and when being removed from small pits abrade the surface around it causing the pits to enlarge.

Instead, take an old razor that is not worth restoring and use it to shave off the red and shallow black rust from the blade as if you were shaving your face. It will come right off. You will also have less pits in the blade. Be careful though because the edge can cut into the blade and ruin it if you press too hard or arent careful around the edges of the blade. Now you can start fine sanding or go to cutting rouges on a polishing wheel then polishing or both.


BTW did you notice that it is now a spike. There was a 1 mm crack at the end of the blade. So I reshaped both into spikes. Good thing too because I don't really like rounds.

[Mike_ratliff]

Very impressive, I'd have given both of those up as a lost cause.

[The Topher]

Now to level the surface so it can be mirror

[deadringer]

They look way better as spikes, IMO. The spine work and real tortoise.. those are definite keepers.. cant wait to see them done.. did they come with the box as well?