In Praise of Sanding (Before Polishing)

I thought it might be interesting to graphically show the difference that careful sanding of a blade can make during restoration. To that I end . I buffed out a pair of blades. And to keep the story interesting, we have a good blade which got rubbed over with lots of sandpaper before getting friendly with the polishing mops and a not-so-good blade which took the quick trip to the polisher in ‘as was’ condition.

[Note: I did the polishing work with a Creusen 6” polisher. It draws something like 500 watts of power and runs dependably and what is more important, fairly quietly. Of course, a polishing machine is useless without the extras, so I invested a fair amount in buffing wheels and polishing compounds. The process I am using involves six different grades of polishing compounds which takes me from a dull sheen up to a mirror finish. Although it is a 6" polisher, I decided to use buffing wheels and mops of 4" and 3" diameters. ‘nuff said, on to the info.]

My good blade is a Gottlieb-Hammersfahr Spanish point which I have been sitting on for some time, waiting to bring to a finish. You can see its original condition in photograph ‘A’. I really like this blade and decided it had to be cleaned up for my personal collection. There was a fair amount of staining and a whole lot of pitting. Due to the lighting, the pitting isn’t so very evident in this photo, but believe me, it’s there, both back and front.

I gritted my teeth and hit the blade with sandpaper and elbow grease… lots of elbow grease. First some application of flap wheels for the worst of the pitting, and then through progressively finer grades of sandpaper up to 2500 grit. I spent something like ten to twenty hours of quality time on that puppy. At that point it was really nice, but needed polishing to take it to the next level.

And to introduce the contender: the not-so-good blade is a rather nice, no-name blade simply stamped with the word ‘Solingen’ on the tang, the same word having been etched into the blade. I’m sorry that I forgot to take a ‘before’ picture, but you can take it from me that it was in about the same condition as the other blade: a little pitting, a little staining, a little rust.

In photograph 'B' you can see both blades in the buffed out condition. With just a casual glance they both appear to be reasonably shiny and nicely finished. But I’m into honesty and so we will zoom in a bit closer to see the important differences.

I slipped an extension tube onto the lens of my camera and moved in a bit closer. Photograph ‘C’ brings us in tight on the blade of the ‘Solingen’. We have a shiny blade here, but polishing has done nothing to reduce the pitting.

Photo ‘D’ shows the side of the ‘Gottlieb-Hammersfahr’. This one is still looking pretty good. So, time to slip on another extension tube and ease in a bit more.

In photograph ‘E’ we are getting up close and personal on the tangs of the respective blades. The ‘Solingen’ blade now looks a bit more like cast metal than shiny steel. The ‘Gottlieb’ blade is better but is also showing its leftover pitting. Let me point out that I was not able to actually remove all that pitting by sanding without severely eradicating parts of the logo. Since I wanted to hold onto the identifying marks, I compromised on the amount of sanding here. Even so, one can clearly see the quality difference in finish between the two blades.

Photograph ‘F’ shows the two blades reflecting a background image. Again, note the differences.

Photograph ‘G’ is yet another example of reflections off of the polished blades. In both of these photographs it is easy to see that the ‘Gottlieb’ blade, having enjoyed the benefits of careful sanding, is the clear winner over the ‘Solingen’ in terms of surface finish and cleanliness of reflection.

A point needs to be made. I did my very best to finish and polish both blades as good as I could, but there are going to be limits to what you can get out of some blades and some steels. Even after all of my TLC, the ‘Gottlieb’ blade still has some little pits and imperfections that I couldn’t eliminate. Some of that I left intentionally, but some of it was just there in the steel in the form of little imperfections and impurities from when the blade was originally forged. Just gotta live with it. Nevertheless, the whole experience has been very instructive to me.

And since we are talking about polishing, I’m going to leave you with a final photo and bit of advice. Photograph ‘H’ shows the face of my little ball peen hammer. You will notice that it, too has a fine, polished finish. Why did I do this? This is the hammer I use to set my razor rivets and that shiny surface on the hammer face imparts the same shiny surface to the head of the rivet. If the hammer was all scuffed and dingy, my rivets would end up the same way. I learned that one in during my university jewelry making class. ;)

- Ignatz

Yah! That is quite a difference. The three that I've done so far have all been sanded a bit before being buffed. I'm not sure if this is trade secrets or not, but 'just wondering what your sanding progression is??? I try not to go below 300 grit to start with and usually go 300, 600, 800, 1000, 1500.

The condition of the razor dictates just what grit size you will use to clean it up. With light rust, you might easily get away with starting at 300. With heavy pitting, you need to be more aggresive.

In this case, I started out with an 80-grit flap wheel, progressing then to a 120-grit flap wheel. Why the flap wheels? Simply because they could take off more stock, more quickly than hand sanding. But my preference is for hand sanding.

After the flap wheels it was all hand sanding with the following sandpaper grit sizes:

150 - 180 - 240 - 320 - 400 - 500 - 600 - 800 - 1200 - 2000 - 2500

... and then, because the results showed that I had left some scratches... I hit the blade again with the following

800 - 1200 - 2000 - 25000

Ouch! :rant:

Of course, I've been accused of being kind of a perfectionist. This might have been overkill, and now that I have the power polishing unit, I might be tempted to stop somewhere between 600 and 1200 grit. But future tests will tell.

There is one other point I forgot to mention. The supplier of the polishing compounds feels that with the coarsest grade of compound he supplies one could start polishing steel from a 240-grit sandpaper finish and still be able to achieve a mirror finish. :confused: I'm sure that would require more wheel polishing time as a trade-off for the the extra grades of sandpaper. But this remains to be tested and seen. And there remains the question of just what one considers to be a true 'mirror finish', taking into account not only shine, but also surface finish.

Thank you, very informative.
And thank you for justifying the 10+ hours Ive spent hand sanding this baby.
Cheers
Grant

Ignatz, That is some good looking work. I also have a Hammesfahr straight and would appreciate any info you can give me about the manufacturer. I already know they made daggers for the Waffen SS during World War 2. My blade has the pyramid with the "+" in it and is stamped with 164 on the other side of the tang.

Thanks Ken