Thread: I ruined it! Please Help me!

The important thing about kamisori is that your edge has to be hagane, the hard steel, which is only on the stamped side. The unstamped side is all soft jigane, so you have to take off that jigane in a higher ratio than hagane to establish an edge. By bread knifing it, you basically took off good steel back to the same level as soft steel.

I can't imagine there's any way to fix it at this point without honing to the point that your omote becomes completely flat, thus needing a regrind.

What Jim said...

Originally Posted by JimR

The important thing about kamisori is that your edge has to be hagane, the hard steel, which is only on the stamped side. The unstamped side is all soft jigane, so you have to take off that jigane in a higher ratio than hagane to establish an edge. By bread knifing it, you basically took off good steel back to the same level as soft steel.

I can't imagine there's any way to fix it at this point without honing to the point that your omote becomes completely flat, thus needing a regrind.

Thank you very much Jim for this helpful comment, but I really don’t believe that this is the problem on fixing this razor.
I say that because the razor is being honed from the back side (without letters) where must be the soft metal according to your indications. This side of the blade is hollow ground and the part of the edge ending to lay on the hone is actually only the hard steel of the front side of the blade (with the letters). So I don’t believe that there is a steel quality problem on the new edge that will be formed.
The real problem according to my opinion is the anatomy of the blade that has to be remodeled and the two curves of the blade, the major on the back side, and the minimal on the front side (because also the front side has a very light, inversed curve, it is not direct).

I think that I worked enough on the 220 stone and the razor is actually as a sharp knife. Later I will work it on the 1k to see if I make any progress.

Slur, that is pretty much what I said.

The majority of the honing is done on the Omote, the front side. Because you now have to take off enough jigane to hit the Hagane coming from the Ura, the slight concavity on the omote will disappear, and you will have a flat omote. Flat omote are VERY difficult to hone, and sometimes can't take a good edge at all because the water will create a cushioning effect and keep the edge off the stone.

Just to clarify, here's a crude drawing of a Kamisori as seen from the "top", the non handle end.


The yellow is Jigane, which won't take a shaving. The blue is Hagane, the "edge" steel.

The entire design is based around the idea of removing Jigane from the Omote to reveal hard blade steel on the Ura.

Removing chips in the edge of a Kamisori is a difficult procedure because of this problem. FYI, Mizuochi-san never takes a kamisori below 6K because too coarse a stone will eat Jigane like crazy and again, it will ruin the grind of the razor.

Mizuochi maybe is right but I had to do it for a necessity, not for the pleasure of honing.
I ate a lot of jigane yesterday on the 220grit and this was absolutely necessary to remodel the blade. However, if jigane is the soft part of the blade it could be removed for necessity reasons as this one.
What I am saying is that the angle of the ura part starts long away from the original edge, thus, there is plenty of space to create a new edge which will be at an angle as the original and created from the hagane part of the steel.

The first pic is from the blade when bough (before the accident) and it shows that the angle is formed far away from the final adge, at least in this particular kamisori:



In the second pic I try to help understand what I am saying:

I did my best. The edge looks very sharp. It easily passed the arm hair test and the hair hanging test.
Tomorrow I will shave test to check if it is as sharp as it was before the accident or not.

Thank you all!

Originally Posted by Slur

I did my best. The edge looks very sharp. It easily passed the arm hair test and the hair hanging test.
Tomorrow I will shave test to check if it is as sharp as it was before the accident or not.

Thank you all!

Best of luck and please let us know what happens.

Slur , how did you go with keeping the front (omote) hollow ?

Oz,
I think it comes down to the size of the razor the small ones probably will not be good to fix that way, but the bigger size has enough hollow to allow for fixing a big chip.

Yes, I did a small one that needed the omote hollow eased a little. Just wondered how much he ground off. Only showed the ura pic post repair.