Tips for buffing out sharpening mistakes

B

Balls Deep

Joined
Jan 2, 2014
Messages
342
Hey Everyone,

When I was learning to sharpen I did not do a good job at first. As a result I have scratch marks on several of my knives that generally look ugly. They're unfortunately too deep to buff out because it appears that a piece of steel flecked off in all cases and would put scratch lines down the blade. I'm wondering if there's any tips or tricks to getting these out that don't involve starting at 300 grit and moving to 3000 over the course of an hour, a "quick" or "quicker fix" if you will. Any help or feedback on similar situations would be appreciated. If I can figure out my flickr account I'll post some pictures of the scratches look like.

Thanks,
Balls
 
The quickest way to get an even finish on your blades?
Send them out for a regrind.

Now that you are proficient at sharpening, you don't have to worry about gouging the primary. Use this as a stepping stone to bump up the performance of your knife and have it reground to .030 BTE (or slightly less).

If I were in your shoes, I would take my 2-3 favorite knives and send them to Josh at REK and have them optimized for your daily usage.
------
If you want to do the work yourself:
It is going to take a powered sander of some sort (belt or random orbital) or a lot of elbow grease and progressively finer grits of sand paper and a solid backer.
Corian works Great!

Go to a custom cabinetry shop that deals in DuPont Corian or similar and ask if you can take a look through their scraps for some small pieces.

Cut, sand and file them to have 90° corners, and one to match the ricasso transition. After that, it is all about elbow grease.

Tldr;
Specifically speaking, exactly what you didn't want to hear.
 
Yes basically as was already said you will need to take the whole surface down to the depth of the scratch to eliminate it. Sanding in just the general area will leave a dip and blemish that is about as eye catching as the scratch. And then really you need to take the other side of the knife down to make it technically "right" . . . centered in relationship to the handle. Maybe that is over doing it but . . .

. . . and doing this by hand is . . . well think of it as "meditation". Marathon meditation.
 
Yep, think about it on larger scale.

If you wanted to remove the Grand Canyon, you can't fill it in. So to get rid of it, you need to remove the earth from around it.
 
Last edited:
Nothing can be done, better to just give the knives to me. [emoji2] [emoji12]

Sent via carrier pigeon
 
To remove abrasions, you either need to add or remove material. There aren't any materials you can add to specially heat treated steel, so your only choice is to buff it out.

Start at a low grit, and move up.
 
On second look I have one knife that I probably could get surface scratches of of with buffing. Any favorite compounds folks have for that on the buffing wheel?

For the other knives they're very inexpensive knives, like $10 Chinese cleaver, Swiss army knives, etc. so I may use it as an opportunity to try the techniques recommended because I'm not out any money worst case scenario.

My problem was when I was early on looking at hand sharpening videos I saw a great Japanese video of a sharpening master sharpening sushi knives, using the two handed method and moving quickly. So being smart me, I spent some time sharpening 3-4 of my knives using that method. Lesson learned - I am not a Japanese water stone sharpening master. Slow and steady works just fine for me, doesn't look as cool but gets me results.
 
You can not buff scratches out of a blade successfully with rouge.
 
Pretty fun video I found on the topic:

[video=youtube;Qiq90HIMERo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiq90HIMERo[/video]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top