Thread: The Making of a MINTY W&B Meatchopper.

I finally got around to restoring the W&B Meatchopper that I got off e-bay a few months ago. I am pleased with the results but must say that I was hesitant to go through with it.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for a response about a contract position and if it comes in today then I will get to keep this razor otherwise this baby is going to go on e-bay .

I wound up doing hand sanding, again! The pitting was just too much and I was going through the sanding disks like chips. After about five 100 grit and five 150 grit disks without making much of a dent in the pitting decided that I was not going to make it with only 50 disks in stock.

Psyched myself up for hand sanding and bit the bullet.

Here is the result. The faces of the blade are brush finish with 400 grit paper and light sanding at 600. The rest is polished to a near mirror finish. The scales are cocobolo with brass pins, washers and wedge. Of course a custom box made from Morado to hold the beauty:



The tools I used are simple: a jeweller's vise and pin and a home made sanding stick.



After doing hand sanding with no help but my fingers, I decided to make something a little more comfortable. It is a scrap piece of purpleheart with a strip of leather glued to the tip. I cut two paper clips and screwed them on to hold the 1/2" strip of sandpaper in place. Later I added foam rubber cushion for the grip to reduce the wear and tear on the flesh.

The pin was modified to create a bottom surface parallel to the top so that I could use small clamps to hold the blade in place during sanding. Holding the blade still during sanding is especially critical when trying to create straight grind marks on the blade face. Holding the blade by hand while sanding results in wavy lines that don't resemble the original grind patterns.

Overall the sanding took 6 hours at 100 grit, and about an hour for each 150, 220 and 320. From 400 to 2000 it took another hour and a half, mostly because the blade faces are only lightly sanded to 600 grit and the rest of the blade does not take much time.

I took pictures along the way so that you can see intermediate results, which at first can look quite scary, but then as the grits go up so does the hope of getting a good result.