Stonewashing to Erase Marks on a Blade

[Sharperthansticks]

I recently had an opportunity to purchase a Grimsmo Norseman at a discounted price because the seller had sent the knife away from sharpening, and the sharpener wound up slightly scratching the flats of the knife. The flats had been lightly stonewashed and it didn't look very bad, but if you tilted the blade at a particular angle and looked at it in strong light, you could see the marks clearly. At this point, depending on what kind of person you are, you have a choice. You can (a) say that a knife is a tool and that scratches give it character, so nothing needs to be done, (b) say that you have to look for the scratches, so nothing needs to be done, or (c) be a perfectionist and see if you can somehow remove the scratch marks.

I chose "c." I contacted the Brothers Grimsmo and heard nothing back, so I decided to try to remove the marks myself. This is roughly what happened:

1. I taped over the flats and then put some caulking on the blade, with the intention of removing the tape and then stonewashing. This was messy and didn't produce a crisp line, so I removed the caulking.
2. I took Gorilla tape and very carefully taped over the shiny part of the blade so that only the stonewashed portion was exposed. This was tricky because it had to be done precisely. If I taped over a small part of the stonewashed area, I would have a part that was later too shiny; if I made the opposite error and left exposed a small part of the shiny blade, this would stonewash the crisp demarcation between the grooves on the knife and the stonewashed flats. The masking had to be done almost perfectly for this to look right.
3. I put my taped up knife and 60-grit media from a rock tumbling kit into a rock tumbler and then tumbled the blade for some hours. There was no visible change to the scratch marks.
4. I went down the street to a creek and collected a tupperware container's worth of rocks and brought them home. I added these to the grit already in the tumbler and started retumbling.
5. Not much happened, so I removed all of the grit from the tumbler and loaded it up so it now just had water, the blade, and rocks of various sizes. I retumbled.
6. A few hours later I checked the results and the scratches were gone! Success! However, I had not been careful enough with the tape, because I had slightly overtaped -- that is, I had taped just slightly into the stonewashed area -- so now there was a visible demarcation between the new and old stonewashing, since the new stonewashing produced a slightly darker (heavier?) pattern. Also, a tiny bit of the grind lines of the blade were washed out on one side, but this was a lesser deal. In principle, though, this was a success, because the scratch marks were erased and a uniform stonewashed look was now present on the flats. (The "damage" to the grind lines was quite minor, though to any perfectionist, any deviation of perfection is significant, of course. The madness has to end somewhere, though.)
7. I re-taped the blade to expose the area that had not been stonewashed because it had been covered up, and I re-stonewashed overnight. Unfortunately, the two areas do not match, yet. I'm wondering if I need to add a bit of grit back into the mix or if I just have to be patient and stonewash for several days in my rock tumbler. There's also the option of putting it in a dryer on a no heat setting to try to accelerate the whole process.

Thoughts? I'm just using a 3lb rock rotary cylinder rock tumbler.

 

[kreole]

Pics of both areas would help immensely. Trying to guess media to use without seeing both is a bit tricky

 

[Sharperthansticks]

Edit: I posted my first post before looking at the knife again and taking this picture.

Just got home from work, and after re-tumbling for a total of about 23 hours, I checked it again, and you can see the demarcation between the first round of tumbling and the second round, but it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between the two, so the tumbling is working. (The border between the two areas is circled in the photo. I can see the boundary more clearly than you can see it in the picture. I should have taken a "before" picture.) The Gorilla Tape, by the way, is taking all this like a friggin' champ. The upper flats look scratched, but they're not (anymore); they're just watery and they have some rock silt on them, too. When this is done, I'm going to tumble yet again, but this time it will be in ceramic media and a burnishing solution to give the stonewash a bit of a sheen.

 

[Cameron Portwine]

Nice lol, I was gonna try something like that if I ended up getting the knife, again congrats on getting the knife and glad you could get the marks out. (I was the other guy who offered on that particular knife )