Mirror finish

On the whole blade or just the edge?
 
Depends where the present finish is at .... on a stripped knife you need to get rid of a lot of machine marks usually .... plus pitting .... if it is satin already then that helps ....

The quick way is to use a belt sander with gradually increasingly higher grit belts and then go for metal polish and a dremmel fitted with polishing mops .... the down side to this is the requirement to have incredibly high tension in the belts to avoid turning a flat grind knife into a convex one .... and a sabre ground knife ditto but with a thicker wedge convex shape .... when the belts "give" you find that the spine also starts to be ground away as well as the edge .... to avoid this the "give" has to be eliminated .... hence the quality of the belt grinder and the tension it can give the belt has to be top notch or you have to improvise .... heavy grit thick belts used as backing belts to the lighter more flimsy higher grits and use the area near the pulley at the top .... or use the platten and back it with leather to avoid "chatter" and scratch marks .... you might need to use more than one leather piece of hide .... and this is the quick method ! It still takes a good while ....

The other method is by hand using loads of wet and dry and going up the grits in the same way and then metal polish .... days and probably a week's worth of work ....

Even if you have a sander which is a good one then unless you can remove and re-attach the grips there is a long labour of love to remove the pitting near the grips and at the pommel .... I used a wedged pencil eraser to wrap the wet and dry around to get it in close and to cope with curves on the grips around the talon hole .... my time was around 40 hours plus .... so good luck if that is the way you choose .... my blade was a Skinny Ash which had to be stripped and needed a lot of work .... stripping a Mistress and you can double the time for a hand finished project ....

With the right quality of gear and removing the grips I reckon you could do a good finish in a solid day .... that makes all the difference time wise and ease of access ....

Good Luck :thumbup:

Needless to say I only have "the one" mirror finished Busse .... :D
 
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