Thread: Following Bill Ellis' advice

Two days ago I PM'd Bill asking for his advice on the custom scales. One of the recommendations was "Use a pristine blade".

The W&B in the violin scales was giving me fits, even before Bill's comment. The pitting was ugly but my previous attempts at removing such pitting resulted in a scrapped blade. The abrasive wheels were no help on such deep pits and I was affraid of ruining the blade.

His advice gave me the resolve. Yesterday I took a ruined blade from three months ago and sanded it to a polished finish. After which I removed the blade from the voilin and proceeded to apply the same technique.

Took about 8 hours, all hand sanded (and I have the hands to prove it).

Here are the results with simple instructions after the pictures. The before pictures are in the voilin scales thread you can see the pitting on the blade.



In general, I used sandpaper cut into strips of about 1.25" and applied pressure with one or two fingers as I sanded. As the .5" or so of the paper would be used up I would fold it over and use the next .5". This continued until the whole strip was used up.

In the end, I resorted to sanding each next grit perpendicular to the previous one so I could tell when previous grit scratch marks have been sanded out. Without this I would get to polishing and discover that I had scratch marks that needed 320 grit the first time and 600 grit the second. After that I just sanded perpendicular to the last grit. Even then there are a few fine 800 to 1000 grit lines but I weighed the time vs. the benefit and decided to call it done.

1. Sanded for a bit under 3 hours with 100 grit to get rid of all the pitting. The etched "Gentleman's Razor" was sanded out too. The pitting was almost as deep and by the time the pitting was gone some of the etching started to look like pitting.

2. Sanded 150, 220, 320, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000

3. Polished, if there were scratch marks go back to the highest grit number that will start to sand them out.

4. Pinned the blade.

5. Honed the blade.

6. Showered to wash off the grime from sanding and test shaved with the razor. BTW this is a superb shaver. This is the second time I had to hone it from establishing the bevel, up. And once again I had an awesome shave only rivaled in smoothness by my Pierre Thiers collectable. So the first honing was not a fluke. This is a great blade.

Manual sanding made me appreciate how slowly high carbon steel is sanded. Going perpendicular allowed me to see the snails view of the process.

When I sanded parallel I felt that the finer grits needed less sanding. The previous scratch marks would be camoflaged by the finer ones in the same direction so it looked like fast progress. When I went perpendicular, I was really surprised at how long it took to get 800 grit scratches out with 1000 grit. I would have thought it would be very quick.

Moral of the story? Sandpaper and elbow grease can get the job done. You don't need fancy tools although they will let you go much faster, but I have a much better feel and appreciation for sanding having done the process manually once.

Next time I will use powertools because I can't say I want to go through that again with nothing but elbow grease.

Thank you Bill for your honest advice. Told you I took it to heart.

Nice work! You do have some persistence!

Nice work! Geez, I get tired sanding out pitting with a flex tool!

Did you sand dry? Kerosene? Do you think the fingertip method gives a better result than using a sanding form like 1" vinyl tubing?

I sanded dry. Tried wet sanding but progress was much slower and I figured it was going slow enough dry.

I did not use a 1" form simply because it was going so slow that anything making it more difficult would be unbearable and having to wrap the sandpaper on a form would be more difficult.

I figured that the removal of metal was so infintesimal that if I made sure that if I sanded methodically the whole blade it would remove evenly which it seems to have done. However, after 3 hours of 100 grit sanding I am sure there are minor variations.

I get sick just thinking about having done this. I really can't do this again by hand. I just persisted because I wanted the blade done and did not have much left of the abrasive wheels.

Next time I will surely use my flexshaft.