Hey all!

I thought that I might post a quick note for those guys that are just getting starting into straight restorations.

When I started restoring straight razors about 3 years ago, I did not have access to a lot of tools, and being a student, money was fairly tight. So I, as many others, turned to hand sanding my blades. As many of the experts on this site will tell you, hand sanding your blades is in no way "wrong" or "bad", but it isn't exactly the fastest way of getting the job done.

So I want to mention something that will really help you guys out. BUY A DREMEL. They are not very expensive at all. If you are restoring a razor that has pitting, you are going to have to remove a substantial amount of metal for the razor. By all mean, take this metal off by hand, but if you do have a dremel, you can get flapwheels for them; which are money in the bank if you ask me.

I usually use a 120 grit flapwheel. I turn my dremel to almost full speed and the sparks fly off very easily.

I haven't found a way to use the dremel to finish the entire process, but you can use the 120 grit flapwheel to quickly (relatively) remove the metal that you need to shed to get down to good metal. Once that job is done, you can continue to happily hand sand with your normal progression, knowing that you have saved HOURS by using the dremel to get the bulk of the job done faster.

Also, if you buy (for about 5 bucks CAD) a cotton dremel buffing wheel- not a disk- you can load it up with mothers mag & chrome polish and get the job of buffing to mirror finish done in a triffle. On my most recent razor, it took me only about 30 minutes with the mothers/dremel wheel combo to get the blade to a mirror finish.

For those of you that knew this already, sorry to bore you, but I sure wish I had known this little tip before spending 9 hours painfully sanding the pitting out of my wedges.