Mirror polish

M

Mikali

Joined
Sep 15, 2014
Messages
23
Hi Guys,

I have been sharpening/polishing my brand new Spyderco delica 4 with a shapton 1000, BBW, Coticule and finally with my leather strop (from the straight razor). It shines very nice and is really sharp, but no mirror shining like I see on some pictures pass by.
How can one become this finish? Only with those diamond spray etc. ? or just more work on a fine stone ?
It's not for my EDC knives actually but more for the collectibles which I will spare a little in use (like the Laguiole f.e.)
 
How fine is your coticule? From my experience you don't start to get really shiny until about 8-10k grit.(however shiny is very subjective:) Also, you might just need to spend more time to make sure the scratches from the previous stone are fully removed.
If I get a wild hair and decide to mirror polish an edge I will usually finish up stone work with my norton 8k and then strop with 1 micron and .5 micron diamond. This results, with my limited skills, in a nicely polished edge.
 
The coticule ranges from 8000 till 12000 grit ...
It shines but I can still see a scratch pattern. Maybe I neeed to be more patient :-\
 
If you're still seeing scratches, you may want to consider going back to some lower grits to get the scratches smoothed out, and then move to the finer polishing stage. I've had good results with Flitz on a strop, after I go through the stages on my Spyderco Sharpmaker (including a lot of time on the ultra fine stones, which are an additional purchase outside of the standard stones that come with the Sharpmaker). I then go to the strop and spend a fair amount of time with green compound, and then to another strop with a couple dabs of Flitz. Mirror finishes look awesome, but as you mentioned, not really the best finish for EDCs since pretty much anything will disrupt the fine polishing. I use your methodology...the only knives I have the mirror finish on are those that rarely, if ever, see actual cutting work. Hope this helps!
 
Sometimes all it takes is diligence. I gave my Ka-bar Fin a mirror edge by simply endlessly stripping the factory edge with green compound. I probably stopped it for a total of like 10 hours. The factory edge was good, and I just refined it from there.

All of my knives now are nearing a mirror finish from decent technique with the DMT EEF (3 micron) then stropping on black, white, and green. I made some nice long paddle straps and it really helped. For the record, the steels in question are a little bit of mid to high end everything, from 154CM to M390.
 
dkb45 said:
...All of my knives now are nearing a mirror finish from decent technique with the DMT EEF (3 micron) then stropping on black, white, and green. I made some nice long paddle straps and it really helped. For the record, the steels in question are a little bit of mid to high end everything, from 154CM to M390.
Click to expand...

This! :thumbup:

There was a thread sometime back that describe the step by step, found it: http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...Beautiful-Mirror-Edge?p=13536629#post13536629
And this: www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/1190884-SouthFork-S90V-Down-to-0-1-Micron
 
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Chris, I'm sooo glad you found that old thread where this was discussed. Keep it available as they'll keep asking for this same information. A Belgian yellow coticule is only 1900-2000 American grit. Japanese grit is configured differently. After working it on that stone you'll need to further work it on a strop with slurry at around 3000 grit to get the polish your after. DM
 
David,

I keep some useful threads as saved page on my opera Mini. Have just saved that one. If needed, I pull it & post the URL again.
 
If you're still seeing scratch marks, you need to refine the scratch pattern further. You'll need to introduce more intermediary grits along the way so as to remove deep scratches as you move forward.
 
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