Thread: Knife restoration

It's going to be fine once it's cleaned up - sometimes the flap discs or sanding discs are the way forward and other times you really need to get a bit more heavy to get to the bottom of the pitting.

If you don't take the pits out, any blood or fat and the like (which is quite acidic) gets caught up and you can't clean it out. Next time you pull the knife out it's got crusty corroded bits and all your work is back to square one!

I can understand what everyone is saying about sympathetic clean ups, but from the first lot of photos after soaking in acid there was still quite a bit of deep pitting. So while the bench grinder is *really* aggressive and I agree there were less abrupt ways to take the metal back under the depth of the pits sometimes you gotta use what you got. It still had to be done from what I could see, you can't fill the pitting back in without warping and stuffing the heat treatment up.

Great granddad would probably be bloody happy that the project is underway and that knowledge is being gained and hands-on time is being spent - once it's complete the knife will still be what it is, and the only thing now is not to thin it any more than it needs.