Thread: My First Restoration Attempts

As I posted in my thread here: http://straightrazorpalace.com/begin...erience-8.html I am starting to have an interest in restoring old razors and in particular Wade & Butcher razors have caught my fancy, as well as other Sheffiled razors, though W&B are the primary ones. As such I have picked up a few from Ebay and will keep an eye out for others.

Here are my first few razors:
Manhattan Cutlery Co. "The Celebrated" which I am attempting to polish up. I intend to continue up the grit scale all the way to 2500 and see how it turns out. After that, I guess I should use some metal polish and the rotary tool with a buffing wheel?

Before 150


After 150


Here are a couple more I got. A W&B Invincible (with the scales) and a W&B Bow Razor with a bit of a frown. For working out the frown, should I just take it to my DMT 325 until I get the blade profile back? X-strokes with extra pressure at the heel and the toe and no pressure in the middle? This would come after polishing it up, I imagine.









I will, of course, spend as much time reading about this in the Wiki and other places as I do actually working on it, but any particular advice on these blades is much appreciated.

Thanks!

Jack

How are you polishing these?

With wet/dry sandpaper. There was quite a bit of patina on the first blade, not to mention the scratches along the spine. I should mention that I had already sanded a bit before I remembered to take my "before" photo.

What grits are you using... just curious

150 - 220 - 320 - 400 - 600 - 1000 - 1500 - 2000 - 2500 are the grits I am planning to use.

On the last blade I restored (Wade & Butcher 4/8 wedge) I used wet & dry with WD-40 as lubricant up to 2k then micromesh with water up to 6k.
After that I buffed it with tripoli and then green polishing wax and, finally, metal polish.
It turned out pretty well.
I have gotten good results from using the 1k to hone out frowns from a few blades - have a look at gssixgun's You Tube videos.
That Manhattan Cutlery is a sweet looking blade - I love the shape of it.
Good luck and let's see the results

I really like the shape of those scales. Very nice. I've never worked with bocote. How is it to work?

Originally Posted by medicevans

I really like the shape of those scales. Very nice. I've never worked with bocote. How is it to work?

Well, I didn't find it too hard, but this is my first time, so I have no frame of reference. Maxi has a pretty sweet workshop and he's also a pretty good teacher, so that helps.

Whew, I just fixed the frowners and boy, was that a job! A couple of them required a good bit of work to get the edge back to a nice happy smile or at least straight. The barber's notch now has a gentle smile, though I had to grind down the stabilizers a bit on my DMT 325 to be able to lay it flat on the hone again, while the same thing happened with the spike point and the Bow Razor blade. I tried to do it on the Norton 220, but it's so soft they were just digging up the stone, so I moved to the DMT, which did the job quickly. Of course, the hollow grind was the easiest, but I finally got what I think is a nice blade profile on all of them, though I did lose some width. The 7/8" Barber's Use might need a bit more to get it back smiling, but at least the frown is gone.

Now it's time to start polishing, since I know they all are able to take a bevel again. I won't make the mistake I made on the Manhattan, where I had to go back and correct the uneven spine