Thread: Admiral Dewey Straight - 4 Resto Questions (pic heavy)

Last weekend I picked up a straight with this engraving of Admiral Dewey on it. Interesting, so why not; didn't cost much. Tang says Imperial Razor, Warranted Registered 20507 Germany.



Didn't have a loupe with me and thus didn't see the couple of, well, dents in the blade. From my USB microscope:





If these were just microchips, I'd know how to deal with that. But these are dents/bends in the bevel. From a camera's eye view, you can see they're not massive, but not too small for me to work out with a coarse hone without removing a lot of steel.

. Here's a camera macro pic, cropped only a bit. The yellow arrow shows one of the dents:



Question 1: Does anyone know anything about this blade? Is it a souvenir piece of junk or does it actually have good steel that will hone well? It looks and feels pretty solid.

Okay, I should have researched before writing this. Imperial seems like a real brand, and some people have like the steel.

Question 2: How in the world would one repair that damage, short of grinding the blade down? I don't have a grinder; all I have to throw at it would be a DMT 8c.

Question 3: Assuming that this is beyond me, what's the ballpark of getting it repaired? I've no problem cleaning and honing it; I just want the damage gone.

Question 4: Who has repaired this very sort of damage?

Thanks.

You can easily repair the damage yourself. You need to reset the bevel anyways. I've seen worse chips or edge dings. Your dmt8c will help speed up the removal of the steel. There's no need at all to grind anything down. Just set a new bevel and keep going at it until the edge is straight and free of nicks and dents. Finish honing as usual. You might want to tape the spine with a layer of electrical tape. Especially when trying to set the bevel and using the dmt8c. I sometimes use the dmt8c too to speed up the removal of steel.
You can always send it out for honing and notify the person about the edge. He might charge a tad more for the extra work or not depending his mood and prices. We don't discuss pricing openly and you can always PM and contact anyone offering those services. The member services at the classifieds is a good place to start.
BTW, beautiful razor and yes, a very well known brand.

Following Max's suggestion, I taped the spine and have been working on the DMT 8c (325 grit). I am getting there.

Here's the before shot of the worst portion (see center and right):


Here's the same portion of the blade. Right ding gone completely, center almost bottomed out.



I still have a ways to go, but perhaps not that much more on the DMT 8C. My next hone up is the Naniwa 1k superstone.

I will probably stop working on the bevel for the moment, clean up the blade (light sanding, taking care not to take the etching out . . though it seems pretty deep) and then go back to repairing the bevel.

Thanks for the encouragement.

That is looking like a very nice blade indeed.

Keep up the good work, Max knows his stuff so he's a great guy to listen to.

Update:

Well, using Max's advice, I managed to get the chips out. I taped the spine so as to avoid undue wear on the DMT 8c. Then I sanded the blade and polished it up a bit. There's some minor staining and pitting, but in general I think it came out well.

Here are the before pix:



Here are some after pix:






I plan to send this one out to Max for honing and tightening the pivot pin. Encouraged to see that I had the tools to take out the bigger chips, and it was fairly easy at that.

Great work!