Thread: Breadknifing Queries

Here's what I would do:

I would simply start by polishing the blade. I wouldn't even remove it from the scales. Once you have polished off all the rust and have a nice shiney blade you can actually se what you have. Even if it is a wall hanger I still like to see a shiney blade, even hough I like the scales to be in their "natural state". Just the way I like my decorations to work. Giving a blade a good polish is cetainly a skill to be developed so that whee I would start, and possibly end with this razor, but a clean blade will tell us far more about its reamaining quality.

Originally Posted by mbwhoosh

by the way have you been reading up on how to do rust removal polishing a razor etc? Mind telling us your plan of attack so some of the guys who do this for a business can give better strategy or helpful hints

basic stuff like what grits to start at

what type of sandpaper to use (heh wood type obviously would do a poor job)

do you know to go in opposite directions when changing to the next grit and not to go to the next grit till all the scratches from the previouse grit are removed



by the way love the sig Gir FTW!!!!

"COMPUTER take me to the weasels!!!"

Slowly but surely I've been reading that information. There's just so much to get through and it seems almost like an art more than a craft. I thought I'd break out the Dremel at first but reading has made me think this may be brash. As of late, I have no definitive idea.

Well, being a tech oriented type I found the electrolytic rust removal methods somewhat interesting. I thought I might start there before I go about doing anything by hand. I figure not only is it a cool way to work on this but if it works I have other unrelated things I could use it on.

Enter electricity paranoia mode.

Before I even got started gathering materials to build a sheet metal container and the setup to do this I started to worry about CFCI protection. And currently that's where this plan is hung up. Let's just say my house had some creative home modeling done by a renter of one of the previous owners. Add in its age and finding appropriate outlets is not easy.

I am not a restorer but I know a former member who is .... or was. He could take a blade like that and have it shining like a mirror.

He started with hand sanding. I once asked him how long it took to get a rusted and pitted blade to the dremel polishing stage and he said about 10 hours of hand sanding while watching TV.

I take my hat off to the members who have that kind of patience but I am not one of them. I avoid badly rusted blades. If the rust is minor I will take some 000 wool and oil and knock it off as best I can and then use Semichrome or some such polish and hone it up.

I don't mind a bit of patina. If there is pitting at the bevel start by getting rid of that and seeing if you can get to good steel. If the pitting is too deep you'll get swiss cheese when you hone it. I also avoid blades with heavy pitting at the bevel.

Breadknifing is for me a last resort for a bad chip that is at least as deep as the bevel. The amount of work it takes to restore an edge after breadknifing is sometimes more than it would have been if you were to flat hone it. Certainly for micro chips I feel I'm better off flat honing.

Well I took a crack at this (mostly to test my Dremel and figure out what does / doesn't work with it) blade. First attempt was done while still in scales so I didn't hit all the spots or get too detailed.

The crack is pretty bad as well as the other chips. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to try to make this into a shaver but it is helping me figure out some polishing.

It's not exactly perfectly polished. I need to spend more time doing the details outside of scales if I want it to be 'perfect'. However, I think I'm going to move on to a real blade that will actually work.

I may try to take the scales off and put them back on just for experience. However the other razor will require rescaling no matter what so I may just do it to that one instead.

Before and after shots of my polishing tests:





(Before picture is upside down...)


As you can see, it's not an overly detailed job. I need to learn how to make things more uniform. It's sort of 'patchy' or 'splotchy' but I think I did alright for the first pass.

I need to learn how to build better jigs or something, though. Orienting the blade while keeping it secure was not easy at all. My vice is not usable at this time or that might have helped.

Nice job man

It may not be perfect but it looks way better than what it did.

Some people have made jigs using spare wood and magnets just brows the workshop and you will find them.

besides the wiki youtube has a bunch a razor restoration that will help especially w/ repinning scales.

Also I hear this guy Bill Ellis is competent w/ blade restorations and gentle as a teddy bear

Nice another good resource to have. Thanks.

I have bread knifed several razors with good luck. I recently talked to Lynn and he does not recommend bread knifing. He says you are better off using circles on a 220 grit with one or two layers of tape on the spine. In any case I only consider blades that have the edge pitted to about 1/2 the width of the bevel or not to reduce the width more than 0.025 inch. I think the razor you have pictured would have to be handled on a grinder first. I would not grind one as a slight wrong angle could shatter it and throw pieces.