Thread: What I'm learning...and amateur's restoration

Originally Posted by Joe Lerch

I don't have the patience either, but I discovered an alternative.

They're called "buffs", not buffing wheels, available from Dremel and Sears. They're not whels. They look like fibrous powder puffs, and they come in coarse (180), medium (280) and fine (320). I've found no doscussiion of them here or on Bill's CD, and I'm wondering why.

What I like about them is that they produce no scratch lines at all, and the 320 is not a bad finish, but I try for something approaching a mirror finish. In any case, the coarse will quickly take out most pitting I run into, and I'm left with a totally smooth surface. The coarse produces a good, healthy spark. I usually work my way up to the 320 and then jump to a 1K sandpaper (hand).

I've tried these too. I've found that as the 'puff' wears with use you start to get stray sections that file more than the rest. These stray sections do leave scratches in the blades I've worked on. However, I don't use them that much so perhaps with more time I might get more proficient with them.

Hand sanding is a bitch! I can not go a full 1hr with one grit as Vlad recommends. I don't have the patience, time or endurance!

C utz

[quote=C utz;72256]

I've tried these too. I've found that as the 'puff' wears with use you start to get stray sections that file more than the rest. These stray sections do leave scratches in the blades I've worked on. However, I don't use them that much so perhaps with more time I might get more proficient with them.

I haven't found they scratch, but I don't use them when there not much material left. They do wear fast. They wear a lot slower if you use all three types in order.

But what I llike about them is that they leave no scratches to remove. You can get a decent finish right from the finest puff, or you can follow directly with a compounded polishing disk (fabric).

With no sratches I only need to hand sand with 1K and 2K, which is pretty quick.

Hand sanding is a bitch! I can not go a full 1hr with one grit as Vlad recommends. I don't have the patience, time or endurance!

Sure is! That's why I use the puffs. I no longer hand sand for more than 15 minutes, 1K and 2K combined.

What I haven't used is the sanding disk set I got from Vladsch. It's made for the Dremel. I only used it once, and I qouldn't find a comfortable way to use the flat disk on the razor surface. If I could it would be great. He has disks going all the way up to 2.5K, and I could make 4K and 9K. I suspect I won't get a benefit from the 4K and 9K until I use them on a Dremel.

Originally Posted by C utz

I've tried these too. I've found that as the 'puff' wears with use you start to get stray sections that file more than the rest. These stray sections do leave scratches in the blades I've worked on. However, I don't use them that much so perhaps with more time I might get more proficient with them.

This weekend, I experimented a little with using the puffs.

I worked with a cadavre, that was a hopeless blade. It was very rusted and had chips i the edge deepr than the bevel, nearly 1/8". The blade was so bad after the rust was removed that the pits were too deep to remove with the coarse puff. So, I quickly removed them with a little grinding wheel on my Dremel. That left grooves much deeper than sanding scratches. But the puffs had no problem removing them.

I worked the blade with the coarse puff to remove the grooves and smooth it, then I finished with the medium and fine puffs. Then, I sanded the forward 1/3 of the blade with 1K and 2K sandpaper and polished the forward 2/3 with WHAM compound a on a fabric Dremel polishing wheel. I snaded with each sandpaper until it produced a nice even scratch pattern.

So, the entire blade is puff processed, the forward third of the blade is also sanded and polished, and the middle third is just polished. On this one blade you can see the effects of puff processing only (rear third), puff processing with polishing (middle third), and puff processing with sanding and polishing (forward third).

I couldn't figure out how to insert the picture here, so please go to my gallery and look at razor2.jpg.

As you can see, a mirror-like finish was produced by polishing just a few minutes until the finish became very shiny. THis removed all sanding marks. Using sandpaper makes no difference. Any scratches that might be left by the puffs (much less than sanding, if any) come off in polishing. I only took about 1.5 hours for this entire experiment starting from rust, so I certainly could have produced a better finish on a real specimen.

In any case, I think this demonstrates the value and convenience of puff processing. Just that finish alone is pretty good.

For the time spent it does look good. I'll admit that.
I'm just not that proficient with the 'puffs' yet. I think perhaps if I could clamp down either the dremel or the blade to work on it (verus holding one in each hand) I might get more uniform patterns.

I'd also probably be a little more conservative and, after the puffs, hand sand starting with 600 or 800 grit paper.

I have a couple of junker's that I'll timker around with. I need to get new puffs though!

I'd also like to try those radial disks that Bill uses. Those are hard to come by though.

Chris

Originally Posted by C utz

For the time spent it does look good. I'll admit that.
I'm just not that proficient with the 'puffs' yet. I think perhaps if I could clamp down either the dremel or the blade to work on it (verus holding one in each hand) I might get more uniform patterns.

It was only an experiment and the blade was in terrible condition. If it was a blade I intended to be serious about I would have removed more of the pitting. You can see that in the middle of the shiny part I was able get just about everything you could see. It even looks OK under a magnifying glass. That what I would do for a quality result- make thew surface look good at 5x before finishing.

I work by hand too, but I put the blade on a bar magnet (actually two end-to end, $2 Sears). That keeps the edge flat against the magnets, and all I have to do is make sure it does protrude past the edge of the magnets. If I want, I can also work with both hands by placing the magnets on a metal surface, like an anvil.

I'd also probably be a little more conservative and, after the puffs, hand sand starting with 600 or 800 grit paper.

I would do coarse sanding, or, as I did, grinding before, to remove the deepest pits. I'm convinced that fine sanding is unnecessary. That is once you use the puffs, finish with a fine one and you can go right o finish polishing. You can see that the fine sanding made no difference. Sanding afterwards with 600-800 just puts in unnecessary scratches after you have a very smooth surface.

I'd also like to try those radial disks that Bill uses. Those are hard to come by though.

I bought some of those from him, but I don't use them anymore. They leave scratches that you have to sand out.

I'm going to go back and try the saning disks I bout from Vladsch. I don't think I gave them a fair chance. I tried a pretty coarse one, I think 400, and wasn't comfortable with it or how fast it cut under power. I have them as fine as 2500, and maybe the finer ones will be mor to my liking. Anything beats hand sanding.

Handamerican.com has quite an assortment of sandpapers and podered abrasives.

In preparing for my first restoration, I must have read this thread 3 times over. It's a very thorough discussion and has helped me a lot. The discussion about the abrasive buffs especially piqued my interest because I figure if I have this nice little Dremel, I might as well use it as much as possible. C utz described an issue he was having where the buffs left little scratch marks and I think I can give a little advice in dealing with them. I found that if I move in little circular motions, slowly progressing down the razor it leads to a much more uniform scratch pattern. So far I've used a 120 grit flapwheel then the three buffs (tan, black, purple) and I think it looks like pretty good progress. Of course, since this is my first attempt I don't really have anything to compare it with, but it is encouraging. I think next I will try the red dremel compound with some felt wheels and see what I get. Thanks again for all the great information!

Jeez!

I forgot about this post!

The red rouge works great, however you will notice that as you turn the blade face, the wheels leave a 'jeweling' swirrly look (to be technical ).

I've since moved on, to use fabuluster (ground to a powder), mixed with Maas, and then follow the cleaning with maas (both with the dremel and small felt wheel).

Also, something that helped me get uniform markings along the blade (with the fiber wheels, aka "puffs") was to use the 'Dremel Drill Press' set up horizontally, and moving the blade (and not the dremel), so the rotation of the wheel was perpendicular to the edge....

Keep us posted, I love to hear new techniques!

Thanks,
C utz

So I worked on the blade again a little last night and some more this morning. Using the the red compound on the backside of the tang did polish most of it up pretty nicely for my tastes. It's certainly no mirror finish and if you turn the blade in the light you can see small scratches, but I think it looks fairly nice. You could certainly take it and start handsanding at 400 or so, thus saving a lot of low grit sanding to remove pitting. This blade had what I consider some pretty bad pitting by the way. Around the pivot it actually went deeper than the maker's stamp.

One unfortunate thing the polishing revealed is that I had pretty sucky technique to begin with. (Slightly less sucky now.) This is hardly surprising as it's the first time I've even used a dremel, let alone to restore a razor. I got a bit careless with the 120 flapwheel and left grooves that were much deeper than the rest of the flapwheel scratches, I assume from tipping up on the "edge" of it and grinding down in.

I also tried a little bit of hand sanding with 400 and 600 and then polishing again; that looks a little bit nicer. Something I could honestly be very happy with on my razors. I think I'm going to take what I learned (very light, even touch) and try it on another razor's tang that I haven't touched yet. Hopefully I'll get the nice spots I can see on the current one, but without any deeper grooves remaining.