Restoring Mirror Polish?

[Josh Feltman]

Ok, so I got a BAS blem as a user knife. Yesterday I used some superglue on the small cracks in the horn handle and put some hooflex on there. I also sharpened it using some Silicon carbide sandpaper on a mouse pad. It worked great, but it also scratched up the bottom part of the blade. I knew this was going to happen, but after seeing it, I was kinda bummed that it wasn't as pretty as it was before I sharpened it. Is there any way to restore the nice polish it came with without using power tools? Maybe I should just not worry about it since it will get scratched up anyway through use. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
--Josh

 

[Federico]

Without using power tools, or even using power tools depends on the depth of the scratch. If its real deep you may want to wait till it gets more scratched as the amount of work will be quite a bit for just one scratch. If its not too deep try a polishing compound like simichrome. That and a little elbow grease will take out alot of scratches. If that doesnt work, try some high grit sandpaper (1000grit-2500grit available at local auto supply) then flitz. Essentially your gonna want to start out at about the same grit of paper as the scratch and then move up. Skipping grits takes more time, and makes the job a whole lot more painful. Hope this helps.

 

[firkin]

You can get a nice polish using the Veritas green chromium oxide honing compound that looks like a big crayon. It even seems to make deeper scratches less noticable for some reason. At 6-7 bucks for a probable lifetime supply it's cheap and you can use it for sharpening on a strop too.

Just rub the stick on some fine emory paper and go. Seems to remove shallow scratches and polishes at the same time. For final finish rub the stuff on the back of the emory paper. Polishes horn up nicely too--you may need to do a bit of final buffing on the horn if some the green color remains in hairline cracks or where-ever.

EDIT:

Some people have done well with slightly modified palm sanders. Search here and on the Shop forum. Make sure either the blade or the sander is very securely clamped!