After stripping the paint, or whatever the finish was, off the knife, I found there were some sharp spots that the finish had smoothed over, or perhaps rounded is a better way to describe it. Those were mostly on the inside of the handle, and in the lanyard hole. For those sharp spots, I took a Dremel and rounded off the edges, and also put a "crown" on the spine of the knife, as I prefer that to the squared off edges on the spine. Then I hit every surface with scotch brite to roughen up the surface of the knife a bit. After that, I washed it thoroughly in dishwasher soap and water and made sure it was dry, using a hand held hair dryer for that. After that I didn't handle the knife with my hands at all, so as to avoid any oil from my hands getting on the metal surface.
I took a large grapefruit and sliced it horizontally so the center of the grapefruit was in the middle of the slice, the center being the rather hollow part of the fruit, and cut the edges off the slices and made the previously round slices into rectangles, so I could line them up end on end and get enough continuous grapefruit lined up to place the whole knife flat on them, and then I cut more to put on top of the knife. So the knife was sandwiched between grapefruit slices.
I used a large cutting board for the base, and put aluminum foil on it, laid the slices down, and put small chunks of grapefruit into the holes that were in the middle of the slices. Then put the knife on top of the lower layer of slices, and then the top layer on top of the knife, and filled in the holes in the grapefruit with more grapefruit pulp. I laid another sheet of aluminum foil on top, and then put another cutting board, smaller than the first, but large enough to cover the knife on top of that. Then I got several items to pile on top of this setup. I think that overall weight there was probably 25-30 pounds of stuff on top of the top cutting board. I moved the setup to the floor, and pressed down on it all until I could feel the grapefruit slices were compressed a bit. In other words I got the slices to squish. The slices were probably about 1/4" thick. I wanted to make sure that grapefruit juice got onto every part of the knife.
The setup was left undisturbed for about four hours, after which it was taken apart. Lots of juice had come out, and made a mess.
In any case, the knife looked great, and it was washed with soap and water several times. After that I put Ren Wax on it, thinking it would truly protect the steel. It didn't, and apparently when I left the knife in the still not completely dry sheath overnight, a bit more oxidation occurred, and in the morning the blade was darker, and looked much better. The photos are a pretty faithful rendition of what the knife looks like, although the color looks slightly different when viewed under fluorescent light, as might be expected.
Hope that info is helpful.
. maybe it was a combination of all the stuff i was prepping for dinner or 52100 reacts differently than blue paper steel? the mystery continues.
