Thread: Cro Ox and Maas Polishing Question.

I know when restoring blades, I should hit them with Cro Ox and then Maas before I move onto sanding. How long should I spend with the Cro Ox and Maas? 5,10,15,......60 minutes or until I don't see any tarnish or is it personal preference?
Note I am doing this by hand, I have no power tools.

nate

Nate,

for starters watch those fingers.

Next it will really depend the razor and the amount of tarnish/crap/gunk... Basically there's to real timeframe anyone can give you. If your intention is to hand sand the blade it really doesn't matter that much how long you spend your time cleaning with Maas. Just a good thorough cleanup with an old cotton rag of cloth. Sanding will remove it all anyways. Better spend your time after the sanding trying to get the razor up to a nice shine. The cro-ox does a marvelous job after the sanding too.

If you're planning to sand it, polishing it first is just a waste (and could make your work harder, depending on what lacquer is in the polish you use). Sanding will remove all the tarnish and such....

Ditto, polish after you sand. Would be like waxing your car before you strip the paint off...

Just curious: how does one polish with chroOx? I posted earlier about using rubbin alcohol pads with cerium ox, but there might be a better way to skin a cat...

Originally Posted by bassguy

Just curious: how does one polish with chroOx? I posted earlier about using rubbin alcohol pads with cerium ox, but there might be a better way to skin a cat...

This caught my eye as well.

Thank you, guys

I thought it was kind of weird to polish before sanding, thank you for confirmation. I will just make sure they are gunk free before sanding.

Max, thank you for the hand protection advise. On my next straight razor hunt I will be looking out for antique chainmail gloves.

Bassguy, I was going to put the Cro Ox on a rag, but now you have me curious, also.

For starters you can use a high grade green rouge.

Green rouge compound is primarily Chromium Oxide admixed with other fine abrasives. Different manufacturers produce different grades with cro-ox content ranging from 5 to 90%

Unfortunately many cheat with the amount of actual cro-ox in their sold compounds and the really only way is to try them out. You can buy 5 different green compounds and each will probably have a different content. BTW this applies to all rouges. Buy and try. It's the only way to try and figure out the quality of that particular compound.

Another option is to buy the green cro-ox powder and mix that with mineral oil for example. Makes for a nice rubbing compound. Can be very messy. I have some of the liquid cro-ox from Hand American and that works great too. I apply a very thin layer, let it dry and buff.

I don't think its a bad idea to polish some razors before you sand, it gives you a better idea what needs to be done, in my opinion. Plus, sometimes you can be surprised that its not as much work as you thought when all the gunk is off.

You can also mix CrO with other polishing compounds. CrO mixed with mothers works well. Its pretty aggressive, the blade can actually start to get pretty warm when its hand polished with the mothers and CrO mix I have.

Nate I'll defer to Max on this but I have an approach that seems to save me some time in the end. If a blade has what seems to be a lot of rust or general gunk on it, first I scrape all the rust and gunk I can from it using a razor blade or exacto knife. Then I use MAAS and a felt wheel on a Dremel at moderate speed to be able to see exactly what shape it's in. I say it saves time because sometimes I find that the amount of stain and pitting is so minor that I either don't have to sand it at all, or I only need to use a high grit sandpaper and a few passes to remove the light stains. I usually find that I still have to go the entire route but the 5 minutes or so that I use starting with scraping and MAAS does pay off on certain blades where I would have committed to a load of hours had I just started off with 220 grit paper.