I told Chris that I wanted to do the final polishing of the bevels so he graciously took it up to a 400 grit belt so that I wouldn’t have too hard of a time getting rid of the vertical grind marks. Here is how the knife looked before Chris sent it back to me. A nice little surprise to us was the amount of core steel that was exposed.
I came up with a few plans on how to finish the knife, both of which involved polishing the bevels up to 0.5 microns.
I first chose to try a fingerstone progression that worked well on my Toyama dammy, but things didn’t end up looking as good as I had hoped. For some reason, I wasn’t able to get a clean & defined lamination line. The cladding also felt like it was reacting (read: oxidizing) differently than other cladding I have worked on.
So I decided to knock off the kasumi, and I decided to go the etching route. Thankfully the lamination line was still visible through the mirror polish so I used nail polish to protect the core during the etch. I used a 30% FeCl solution for the etch, which I left on for a few minutes before scrubbing clean with 0000 steel wool. I repeated this process twice, and then I removed the nail polish prior to final polishing.
For me, this was a fun but challenging project, and it would not have turned out as good as it did had it not been for Chris’ immaculate work. I couldn’t recommend him more, and I’m looking forward to our next project together. Thanks Chris!!!
....I think everything else has been said.
