Toothpaste, newspaper/magazine, or chromium oxide?

[stuffstuff]

Someone told me that they use toothpaste to polish their knives, I've heard of newspaper polishing, and I know that chromium oxide is usually used on strops. So, which is the best method, and what are the approximate grain sizes for each?

 

[Magnaminous_G]

For the toothpaste, you'll have to ask the manufacturer. Please let me listen in on that conversation.

 

[9blades]

Toothpaste.........interesting.

 

[discdoggin]

I use Maas metal polish. I'm not sure what the particulate size is but the finish is mirror rorrim!

DD

 

[lobodelanoche]

Is this referring to polishing the metal surfaces or the edge? I know you can use toothpaste to polish silver as long as you rinse thoroughly, i was wandering if there was a "common household item" way to polish an edge.

 

[richard j]

as an experiment i put some toothpaste on my slotted paper wheel just to see if it would work and it did. one of these days i might try different brands to see if there is much of a difference. heavyhanded tried usnig strips of newspaper to strop an edge and i think he might have even posted about it. he wanted to see if it would give him a toothier edge from the different layers.

 

[Obsessed with Edges]

On a driven sharpening device (like the wheels), softer abrasives can sometimes work well, but only because of the velocity at which the polishing action occurs. On a strop by hand, not so much. Most toothpastes use what's called 'hydrated silica' for their abrasive, and it's not very aggressive stuff on hardened steel. Think about it; if toothpaste were aggressive enough to polish hardened knife steel by hand, would you really want to be using it on your teeth? It'd strip the enamel away from your teeth in short order.

On a strop, I wouldn't waste time with the toothpaste, as it's likely not doing any more than a bare leather strop would do. If you want to see how much it works, apply it to a piece of clean, white paper and strop on it. The lack of any grey/black streaks left on the paper will tell you how minimal the real polishing (metal removal) is. It may serve more as a 'cleaner', removing debris and other loose contamination from an edge, but will do little more than that.


David

 

[HeavyHanded]

Someone told me that they use toothpaste to polish their knives, I've heard of newspaper polishing, and I know that chromium oxide is usually used on strops. So, which is the best method, and what are the approximate grain sizes for each?

Personally for hand stropping I'd stay away from toothpaste and jeweler's rouge, they just aren't abrasive enough (unless power driven) to touch hardened steel - tho they do a good job of a final cleanup probably not much more than plain leather. There are so many abrasives you can apply to a strop, and so many materials you can use for a strop the options are bedeviling. Newspaper is probably a mix of abrasive sizes, hard to say. I find it does a real good job on edges coarse to fine as a final stropping. I am also fond of simply wrapping a sheet or two of newspaper around my combination stone and applying compound to that for a strop - then I can just recycle it when it loads up with removed steel. As Richard J said, I have a couple strops I made from copy paper and aligned the sheets like layers of wood in a butchers block - made the paper much more rigid and it works very well. You'd be surprised how much polish can be managed from a sheet of paper - much harder to do is pinning down the what and why. There are silicates and likely titanium oxide as a whitener in the paper itself, and the pigments probably have some abrasives as well. I get pretty good results on plain paper, so the ink isn't much of a concern (to me).

Generally I use three grades of compound if I'm going that route - black emery is about 15-20 micron (a guess) and works great for putting a satin finish on a blade that's been thinned or scratched up - it also makes a good stropping compound for finishing toothy edges and repairing finer edges that are lightly damaged, prior to stropping with a finer abrasive. Second compound I use is Flexcut Gold, but I also use Dico stainless and Ryobi yellow, as well as many of the white compounds. These will put a real nice polish on a blade face and whip an edge up pretty fine. The Flexcut and most of the white compounds are a bit finer than the other two but I put it in this category as its just a step off the zippity do da compounds that are verified submicron. These ones are about between 1 and 3 micron and represent a pretty high level of polish - certainly good enough for most uses and I've even heard of people stopping at the Flexcut for their straight razors. Green chromium oxide is about .5 micron and along with some of the submicron diamonds are the most common fine abrasives.
Other stropping compounds can be as simple as claiming some of the mud from a waterstone, or the slurry from a silicon carbide stone and applying to paper, leather, linen, fine canvas. You can apply the same compound to three different backings and get three different results. As a general rule stay away from stopping bases that are soft - they have a much smaller margin of error in terms of pressure.

There's a good sticky at the top of this subforum that is well worth a read.
Now that that's all cleared up....

 

[Magnaminous_G]

Most toothpastes use what's called 'hydrated silica' for their abrasive, and it's not very aggressive stuff on hardened steel. Think about it; if toothpaste were aggressive enough to polish hardened knife steel by hand, would you really want to be using it on your teeth? It'd strip the enamel away from your teeth in short order.

On a strop, I wouldn't waste time with the toothpaste, as it's likely not doing any more than a bare leather strop would do.

What you are ignoring is the fact that the toothpaste smells and tastes better than stropping compound, and will also get rid of any plaque/tartar that might be on the surface of the knife.

 

[phillipsted]

heavyhanded tried usnig strips of newspaper to strop an edge and i think he might have even posted about it. he wanted to see if it would give him a toothier edge from the different layers.

I wonder if the OpEd section of the paper would provide a toothier edge than the Comics...

TedP

 

[OHALLUM]

I would think if you wanted a "TOOTHIER EDGE" ,What Better medium to use than "TOOTHPASTE"! :applouse:

Blessings,

Omar