Thread: Can this razor be saved?

There are two small chips on the "True Blue" Simions Hdwe Co. blade, could they be honed out? Thanks

yes it can be saved , tape the spine and ues a bevel setter i ues a dmt 325 and hone it till the chips are gone

It looks like a fairly straightforward fix. Can't see from the photo, but the only reason it couldn't would be if there were cracks from the chips. They don't look big enough to be serious though.

Yes, they can easily be honed out. Put some tape on the spine to protect it while removing the chips. Use a 1200 grit stone, and with a little pressure hone out the chips at the Point and the Heel to give the edge a bigger smile.

When the chips are gone, you can continue to set the bevel with a roiling "X" stroke and finish with your finishing stone.

you can hold the razor spine lifted from the hone and hone out the chips, then tape if you want and set the bevel and so on. This will just speed the process. Warning when you do that you need to be careful with the applied pressure.

Can't see much point in lifting the spine. The bevel will still need setting, so you're saving nothing by lifting it. When you're new to honing you're better spending your time learning how to keep good contact on the hone.

Originally Posted by Clockguy

There are two small chips on the "True Blue" Simions Hdwe Co. blade, could they be honed out? Thanks

I wouldn't call those chips "small" . They can be honed out but it will change the blade geometry . IMHO the edge of a razor should parallel the spine , ie; a smiling blade should also have smiling spine . IMHO your best bet would be to "breadknife" the edge and re-bevel it , which is a very time consuming project . Personally , I would find a blade without chips .

Originally Posted by ben.mid

Can't see much point in lifting the spine. The bevel will still need setting, so you're saving nothing by lifting it. When you're new to honing you're better spending your time learning how to keep good contact on the hone.

As I said it saves time, at least for me, its just a modification to breadknifing. The OP can do it whichever way he wants, and I am not sure that using this technique has anything to do with how new one is to honing as long as one pays attention to how much pressure is applied.

I personally would not bother taping, as Dave mentioned, removing those with tape on the spine would alter blade geometry, and removing them without tape wouldn't take too long anyway. I'd grab a DMT XXC (or several sheets of 120-150 wet/dry and a flat surface). In my experience removing chips that size from razors (other than wedges) it shouldn't take any more than half an hour or so of circles (I tend to do sets of 20, alternating sides... check ever couple pairs of sets to see if the chips are gone yet... on 120-150grit it will likely be even faster, I work on a 220grit plate... anything up to 1200grit (as suggested above) will work, higher too, but the higher you go the longer it will take) with a little bit of pressure and frequent washing of the dmt/paper to get that razor ground past those chips. Then I'd do maybe 30-50 alternating strokes on 600 (assuming you were using a lower grit than that) and then on to whatever stone you would like to use to set your bevel.

Note of course that not using tape will give the razor considerable wear on the spine (as you must remove a decent bit of metal), so the blade will wind up looking less pretty than if you had used tape.

If you don't plan to do it yourself, I'm sure there are honers who'll do it for you. Probably for a bit more than their usual (undamaged razor) cost. I'd suggest you look one up on the classifieds and shoot a pm with a link to that image asking if they're interested in honing it for you and what it would cost. I'm told that most professional honers will tape it so as to preserve the look of the razor, the general consensus among them from what I've seen seems to be that the change in geometry is insufficient to appreciably impact performance. But if you want to be sure, I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you their method if you ask.