Thread: My First Restore - Wostenholm

Originally Posted by singlewedge

Time, patience and a buffer.

I hand sand all my blades. The reason that the blade is harder than the tang is that the tangs are not typically heat treated. So they are softer than the blade which is heat treated.

Thanks! Yeah - I figured the tang wasn't heat treated. I was actually surprised to find that out!

Last night, I went to the diamond polishes and got a better result, but I think I need more time to get those scratches left by that last slip stone. They don't want to come out that easily....I've been taking baby steps, not wanting to overdo anything - low speed on the rotary tool and limited diamond paste- so naturally I'm under-doing a little.

The learning curve on the first piece is always the steepest. I'll post new pics after.

Congrats on your first Tom. Interesting concept on the slip stones. Bit like Japanese sword polishing. Kewl
A little more elbow grease & those minor scratches are history.

Originally Posted by onimaru55

Congrats on your first Tom. Interesting concept on the slip stones. Bit like Japanese sword polishing. Kewl
A little more elbow grease & those minor scratches are history.

That's what I was going for, but the concave hollow grind made things a little more difficult.

I switched to sandpaper #100, 320, 400 800, 1200, and 2000, and I found that up to about 400 grit, the results are quite similar. Next time I will try to use the stones up to 600 or so and then switch to sand paper.

Anyway, here are the latest results. Feed back is welcome.

It's to shiney

No really great job with the pics, nice to see the progression

Do you think I need to get rid of more scratches?

Tom,

it's already a huge improvement. IMO, yes you do. Some more.

Why not go for perfect. You've already worked so hard to get this far. The best way to learn anything is try and sweat it out the first time. That way you can learn and you will know what to do next time.

I give you and the rest of the guys that sand their blades to a perfect mirror finish. It takes a lot of patients which I seem to be short of. In my Tool and Die Maker days I would try to avoid work that required polishing like the plague. I have mellowed some with age but not enough to spend a lot of time polishing. I feel lucky to be able to hone my blades to a perfect edge w/o going crazy.

You're doing excellent work polishing the blade. You may already know, if you want all of the scratches out you need to be sure all scratches in the blade match the grit being used before moving to the next finest grit on your process or you will be wasting your time. Also be sure there is not contamination on the blade or anything else touching the blade from the coarser grits. One stray particle will cause scratches deeper than the current grit and you will going backwards.

Good luck!