Fading Ano Advice Direct from Olamic

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Sharperthansticks

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I ordered a semi-custom Wayfarer 247 from Olamic, and after spending a lot of time with the Olamic guys configuring everything just right (not to mention the $700 that it cost in the end), I was a bit disappointed when the knife arrived. Some of that disappointment may not be their fault; one of the things that bugged me was that the frosty blue surface of the handle had spots that seemed to almost instantly fade to gray; I didn't realize that the surface preparation I had opted for was a variation on anodization. In any event, I wrote to Eugene and Ilya about the issue, and Eugene replied with this:

You are seeing a pretty typical effect of an anodized surface. The gray areas are ones that your fingers have handled most. If you take a chamois cloth (like this one, or anything similar) and give that area a HARD wipe, you will reveal the color again. I do not recommend microfiber cloths as the fibers can trap dirt/debris and ultimately scratch the surface. Another option is to take a clean tissue/paper towel, dab it with acetone or isopropyl alcohol, and give the surface a light wipe, then wait for it to dry, and the color will come back.​

An alcohol wipe did the trick and did it really easily. I thought others may benefit from this info, if they didn't already know it.
 
Windex is anodized titanium's friend:thumbsup:
 
Windex is what we highly recommend for all our anodized knives. A very small amount so it just barely dampens the knife. Just curious can we see a pic of the Wayfarer you got?
 
My anodized Olamic was close to grey on receipt, and nothing I did (chamois, alcohol, windex) ever got it anywhere close to the picture they'd sent. Can't really blame handling because pretty much the only time I touched it was when I was making the aforementioned efforts. Good to hear that you had better luck than I did, though. :thumbsup:
 
At least one person asked to see what the Olamic knife looks like. It didn't come out *exactly* as I envisioned it would, but they still did a good job. Here's an imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/QUrSFWj . The pictures were taken at night; I think it looks slightly better in full daylight.
 
Sharperthansticks said:
At least one person asked to see what the Olamic knife looks like. It didn't come out *exactly* as I envisioned it would, but they still did a good job. Here's an imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/QUrSFWj . The pictures were taken at night; I think it looks slightly better in full daylight.
Click to expand...
Damn, that's gotta be the best looking Olamic I've seen in a long time. Very nice knife.
 
It is pretty common knowledge that finger oils will change the color of anodized ti. If you don't want it to do that then the only other option is some sort of paint, but I think anodizing looks best even with the color change
 
So, here's a response to the last few posters:

I'm not sure that it's common knowledge that oil will change the color of anodization. Put together a bunch of topologists, and it's probably common knowledge that a set in a compact space is compact if and only if it is closed and bounded, per the Heine-Borel theorem; for them it's common knowledge, but I'm not sure it would be for the population at large. I'm not a knife craftsman and I'm not a knife anodizer, so I didn't know that fingerprint oils change the color of anodization. More than that, I would say that not only is that *not* common knowlege, but rather that there's misinformation with regard to anodization in the knife community. I once sold a LNIB Arius to a guy who complained that the anodization had "already rubbed off." He probably just needed to rub off the oils on the knife and the ano would have come back; neither of us knew about fingerprint oils, apparently.

Thanks to the people that like the knife; yes, it was done well. Here are the things that disappointed me about the knife and the whole process:
  1. The knife is finished in what Olamic calls "frosty blue." I'm not a materials engineer, and Olamic does not disclose exactly what that is -- which is fine to a point, since trade secrets are trade secrets, after all. The problem is that I didn't know that frosty blue is a variation of an anodization. You may think (in retrospect) that it's obvious that it is, but I didn't realize that. Combine that with the fact that I didn't realize that if I touched the knife, it would fairly quickly change color, and here you have a knife that changes colors, which is what I didn't expect. I'm not sure that Olamic is at fault here (though perhaps they could have disclosed the color changing aspect ahead of time), but it's a bit disappointing.
  2. I was going for a two-tone pattern, meaning that there should only be two colors in the whole knife: steel and blue. To further strengthen this contrast, I chose *not* to have the chamfers of the "acid rain" pattern in the handle anodized. The idea was to have the steel chamfers further play off the steel color of the knife. The thing, I had never seen one of their acid rain knives up close; I'd only seen it online. When I got my knife, I noticed that the chamfers were fairly shallow, so you could only see theM if the face of the knife was not pointed directly at you. In other words, the knife had to be on a slant for the chamfers to show. That's not what I expected. Was Olamic at fault? Probably not.
  3. The communication process with Olamic was difficult. To get this knife right, there was a lot of discussion that had to go into it, and I'm a fairly demanding customer. (For example, the clip is a custom clip, which I paid more for, because their regular clip produces hot spots in the palm.) Sometimes I wanted to discuss or verify something with them. (In some initial pictures they sent me, the top and bottom of the pivot did not match. Ultimately, we switched to a different pivot finish, so it didn't matter.) Unfortunately, almost all discussion had to be done via text and via email, since this was Olamic's preference. This made things difficult for me, the consumer. I will say that we had one discussion via phone. (That turned out not to be enough.)
 
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