Martyfish's Knife Makeovers (Thinning, Refinishing and Handle Making)

[Martyfish]

I wanted to create a new thread just to make it a bit clearer that I am posting knife related content instead of operating a dodgy beauty salon

The previous thread, named 'Martyfish's Makeovers', which this is a continuation of, can be found here if anyone is interested:

https://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/threads/martyfishs-makeovers.66507/
Now, on to actual content. My Mazaki project is reaching the satisfying point where the knife starts looking better rather than worse. Today I pretty heavily altered the choil geometry and the geometry at the transition between the choil and tang, by removing 4ish mm of steel. This material removal was purely aesthetic in nature with the goal of bringing this area back into proportion with the future handle and the rest of the knife. Once the choil had been reshaped to my satisfaction, I also rounded the edges and polished it up to a semi-mirror finish, which are processes that I also repeated for the spine.

Refinishing the blade and the creation of a new handle to come.

Pictures and videos of the polished and rounded choil:

Pictures of the polished and rounded spine:

 

[flow_the_pro]

Is that the Mazaki I sold you?
Really nice thread, wish i would have found it earlier! Been toying around with similar projects!

 

[Martyfish]

Is that the Mazaki I sold you?
Really nice thread, wish i would have found it earlier! Been toying around with similar projects!

Yep, that's your old Mazaki . Thanks, I'm glad you liked the content and hope to see some similar projects from you in the future.

 

[KasumiJLA]

Nice work! Will follow your journey

 

[Tekkz]

Great polishing and nice pictures!

 

[Martyfish]

Wife's Knife Part 2

I got around to refinishing my wife's knife today, after thinning it last weekend. There are still a few errant scratches here and there, but my wife couldn't care less and I didn't care enough in this instance to keep going.

Below you can see a choil shot comparison before and after thinning and refinishing, which really illustrates the performance based transformation the knife went through. The choil shots look a bit blurry and out of focus, but if you zoom in, you can see surprising detail.

The blade is now much thinner behind the edge and has some really nice low grind convexity. I'm honestly looking forward to giving it at try.

 

[Martyfish]

Mazaki Makeover Part 3: Refinishing

I completed the refinishing of my Mazaki over the weekend and with that, my work on the blade is now done.

This was my first time working with iron cladding or kurouchi and both of these things caused me minor issues that I will improve upon next time I deal with them. The first issue was unintentionally creating a small and very shallow hollow section when refinishing an area of the cladding that was adjacent to a section of core steel with deeper scratches. The iron was softer than the stainless steel I am used to refinishing (or maybe the core steel was harder than what I am used to working with) and the cladding simply abraded away faster than I was expecting. Either way, that's something I'll pay more attention to in the future. The second issue was with my visualisation of the transition between the polished area and the kurouchi - I thought it would look cool to have a softer and more gradual transition between the two, which I polished in, but in hindsight, I think it looks better with a hard transition. I am still very happy with how it turned out, but there is room for improvement next time

Full disclosure - the first 4 photos where shot with exposure compensation set to -2ev to reduce the reflections off of the polished surfaces back to approximately the level that our eyes see, so that the polishing can actually be appreciated. Unfortunately in my experience, it is impossible to get accurate photos of highly reflective, polished surfaces directly out of a camera. The polished areas either light up like a lightsaber or the darker areas end up being far too dark. As a consequence, the kurouchi and background in these 4 photos look a bit darker than in reality, while the polished surfaces are accurately represented. The true color of kurouchi can be seen in the final two pictures for anyone curious.

 

[flow_the_pro]

Looks good!
What did you use for polishing?

 

[Martyfish]

Looks good!
What did you use for polishing?

Thanks! I removed the deeper scratches left over from thinning and evened out the scratch pattern using sandpaper (P320 and P600 grit). I polished the core steel up to P5000 grit with sandpaper, but I wasn't so happy with the results, so I spent a few minutes using a Naniwa Pro 3k stone and Arashiyama 6k stone trying to remove some of the shallow but still present scratches in the core. I then spent some more time polishing the core with P3000 and P5000 grit sandpaper until I was happy with how it looked. Finally I made a slurry out of F360 grit silicon carbide powder and Windex and rubbed it into the blade using 0000 steel wool as an applicator, which brought out the contrast between the core and cladding.

 

[Martyfish]

Mazaki Makeover Part 4: A Roughly Shaped Handle

Here is a preview of the handle that I'm making for my Mazaki nakiri. The pieces are still hand-sawn, hence the very crude shape, but that will quickly change once I get it on a belt sander. The ferrule is ebony and the butt is olive wood. The olive wood is especially pleasant to work with, because it is very fragrant and smells amazing.

 

[Martyfish]

Mazaki Makeover Part 5: An Almost Finished Handle

Here are some progress pictures from the wa handle that I am making for my Mazaki nakiri. Today I finished up shaping the facets on a belt sander, hand sanded the handle up to P2000 grit and gave the handle its first coat of tung oil.

The five pictures below were taken directly after shaping the facets on the belt sander and the handle is at P120 grit here:

The two pictures below were taken after sanding the handle up to P2000 grit, but before applying tung oil. You can also see how the dimensions of my handle compare to the original chonk of a handle that came with the knife. There is nothing inherently wrong with larger handles, but the original handle looked a bit out of place on a 165mm nakiri.

Top / bottom:

Sides:

 

[Jaeger]

Pretty cool, looks comfy

 

[Martyfish]

Mazaki Makeover Part 6: a Nice Handle, But Not a Very Tasty Popsicle

I applied the first coat of tung oil a few days ago and the oil has been absorbed and has also mostly cured. I'll probably apply 2 more coats of tung oil before I mount the handle, but it will not visually change in any meaningful way from this point. I'm really happy with how this one turned out and am looking forward to putting the knife to use

 

[tostadas]

Very clean!

 

[Rideon66]

So for the Olive wood all you added was Tung oil and got that look? I have a raw Olive wood handle and was trying to decide what to do. I like the look of the tung oil and might try that. I did ebonizing on my other Olive wood and it looks how I wanted it, but not like this.

So this is what I am working with.

This one looked like the one above before cutting,staining with tea and ebonizing with homemade Iron acetate.

 

[Martyfish]

So for the Olive wood all you added was Tung oil and got that look? I have a raw Olive wood handle and was trying to decide what to do. I like the look of the tung oil and might try that. I did ebonizing on my other Olive wood and it looks how I wanted it, but not like this.

So this is what I am working with. View attachment 286469

This one looked like the one above before cutting,staining with tea and ebonizing with homemade Iron acetate.

View attachment 286470

Here is collage showing the progression that the handle went through after shaping, so that you can see the effects of each process.

The top image is at P120 grit, the middle image is at P2000 grit and the final image is after the first coat of tung oil.

Taking the handle from P120 grit up to P2000 grit makes a large difference to the depth of colour and contrast, which I would attribute to less light bring randomly reflected from the scratches in the wood. The tung oil then further deepens the colour and adds additional contrast. If you were to leave the handle at a relatively low grit and apply tung oil, you would still end up with a very similar result to the bottom picture, so polishing the wood isn't critical.

Our two pieces of olive wood have a similar colour and there weren't any more intermediate finishing steps (just polishing and applying tung oil), so it should yield a similar result for you.

 

[enchappo]

Mazaki Makeover Part 6: a Nice Handle, But Not a Very Tasty Popsicle

I applied the first coat of tung oil a few days ago and the oil has been absorbed and has also mostly cured. I'll probably apply 2 more coats of tung oil before I mount the handle, but it will not visually change in any meaningful way from this point. I'm really happy with how this one turned out and am looking forward to putting the knife to use

View attachment 286454View attachment 286455View attachment 286456View attachment 286457

That olive wood is lovely

 

[Martyfish]

Mazaki Makeover Part 7: Project Finished

After a long Christmas break I finally got back to finishing my Mazaki project. Over the course of the project, bevels were thinned, edges were rounded, a blade was etched, surfaces were refinished and a handle was created, as documented in the 6 previous Mazaki posts. I'm really happy with the end result and look forward to finally putting it to use.

This is probably the most representative before and after picture showing the visual change thaf the knife underwent. The stand-out differences are a nicer polish, kurouchi that appears cleaner and more even thanks to the etching and a nicer and more appropriately sized handle.

Here're a few other pictures showing the finished product:

 

[enchappo]

Really nice

 

[Martyfish]

Yoshikane Spa Day Part 1: Thinning and Polishing

My Yoshikane was starting to get a bit thick behind the edge, to the extent that the degradation in performance was becoming noticeable. It was not really performing so badly, but the knife was also no longer Yoshi thin. I picked up some new materials over the last few weeks, namely finger stones and diamond polishing compounds, so I thought the Yoshi was a good candidate to thin and then test the new toys on. My goal was to thin the blade, add some low grind convexity and create a mirror polished core with a nice hazy kasumi on the stainless cladding.

This is the condition of the knife before I started - a pretty aesthetically pleasing kasumi that I would assume was bead blasted together with a semi mirror polished core that had developed a tiny bit of a patina.

Some more detail of the polish can be seen in the two pictures below (you might need to zoom in a bit), illustrating a relatively fine vertical scratch pattern on both the core and cladding. The large-ish and not so even edge bevel can also be seen here.

I had never undertaken such a light thinning in the past, so I was a bit unsure about which stone to start with. I didn't need to remove too much material and also didn't want to introduce scratches into the core steel that would be very deep and annoying to remove. I decided to start with a Naniwa Pro 800 and it proved a good choice, because it brought the edge back to a desirable thickness pretty quickly, removed the deeper scratches in the original polish and left a good working surface going forward. I normally prefer to polish knives with sandpaper, because I find it more forgiving and controllable, but a mirror finish sandpaper progression takes too long on high hardness steels, so I have started splitting the process by polishing the core steel on bench stones and then the cladding with sandpaper. This is pretty evident in the photos below (although you made need to zoom in a bit) in that the vast majority of the original scratches have been removed on the core steel but some scratches are still present in the cladding.

From here I repeated the process on a Naniwa Pro 3k and an Arashiyama 6k, which left a pretty satisfactory semi-mirror finish. This is normally where I would stop polishing the core steel and start applying a kasumi on the cladding, but in this instance, I wanted to test the diamond polishing compounds and bring the core up to a proper mirror finish. The pack of diamond polishing compounds that I bought came in 12 grits ranging from 0.5 to 40 micron and these were just one of the Chinese products that was available on Amazon. I started polishing with the 3.5 micron compound, using a cotton makeup pad as an applicator and followed this up with the 1.5 micron and the 1 micron compounds. This left me with a pretty decent mirror finish on the core steel and while it's not perfect and scratch free, you really need to search pretty hard to find the scratches. Below is a picture of my t-shirt reflected by the polished blade and if you zoom in, you can see the individual stitches, so it's pretty damn reflective. I also like how how you can see the mirror finish taper off as it approaches the hammered section due to the fact that I was focusing on the core steel.

I tried to get some better pictures of the blade, but anything approaching a mirror polish is ultra frustrating to photograph, so I ended up settling for a short video.



Kasumi finish to come.

One of the lessons learned from this process was to bread knife the edge on a stone a few times to dull it and repeat as necessary if it starts to cut the makeup pad. I managed to form an apex while using the diamond polishing compounds, which resulted in me shredding a few makeup pads and nicking my thumb before I got smart enough to dull the edge.

 

[tostadas]

Yoshikane Spa Day Part 1: Thinning and Polishing

My Yoshikane was starting to get a bit thick behind the edge, to the extent that the degradation in performance was becoming noticeable. It was not really performing so badly, but the knife was also no longer Yoshi thin. I picked up some new materials over the last few weeks, namely finger stones and diamond polishing compounds, so I thought the Yoshi was a good candidate to thin and then test the new toys on. My goal was to thin the blade, add some low grind convexity and create a mirror polished core with a nice hazy kasumi on the stainless cladding.

This is the condition of the knife before I started - a pretty aesthetically pleasing kasumi that I would assume was bead blasted together with a semi mirror polished core that had developed a tiny bit of a patina.

View attachment 308348

Some more detail of the polish can be seen in the two pictures below (you might need to zoom in a bit), illustrating a relatively fine vertical scratch pattern on both the core and cladding. The large-ish and not so even edge bevel can also be seen here.

View attachment 308349View attachment 308350

I had never undertaken such a light thinning in the past, so I was a bit unsure about which stone to start with. I didn't need to remove too much material and also didn't want to introduce scratches into the core steel that would be very deep and annoying to remove. I decided to start with a Naniwa Pro 800 and it proved a good choice, because it brought the edge back to a desirable thickness pretty quickly, removed the deeper scratches in the original polish and left a good working surface going forward. I normally prefer to polish knives with sandpaper, because I find it more forgiving and controllable, but a mirror finish sandpaper progression takes too long on high hardness steels, so I have started splitting the process by polishing the core steel on bench stones and then the cladding with sandpaper. This is pretty evident in the photos below (although you made need to zoom in a bit) in that the vast majority of the original scratches have been removed on the core steel but some scratches are still present in the cladding.

View attachment 308351View attachment 308352

From here I repeated the process on a Naniwa Pro 3k and an Arashiyama 6k, which left a pretty satisfactory semi-mirror finish. This is normally where I would stop polishing the core steel and start applying a kasumi on the cladding, but in this instance, I wanted to test the diamond polishing compounds and bring the core up to a proper mirror finish. The pack of diamond polishing compounds that I bought came in 12 grits ranging from 0.5 to 40 micron and these were just one of the Chinese products that was available on Amazon. I started polishing with the 3.5 micron compound, using a cotton makeup pad as an applicator and followed this up with the 1.5 micron and the 1 micron compounds. This left me with a pretty decent mirror finish on the core steel and while it's not perfect and scratch free, you really need to search pretty hard to find the scratches. Below is a picture of my t-shirt reflected by the polished blade and if you zoom in, you can see the individual stitches, so it's pretty damn reflective. I also like how how you can see the mirror finish taper off as it approaches the hammered section due to the fact that I was focusing on the core steel.

View attachment 308353

I tried to get some better pictures of the blade, but anything approaching a mirror polish is ultra frustrating to photograph, so I ended up settling for a short video.



One of the lessons learned from this process was to bread knife the edge on a stone a few times to dull it and repeat as necessary if it starts to cut the makeup pad. I managed to form an apex while using the diamond polishing compounds, which resulted in me shredding a few makeup pads and nicking my thumb before I got smart enough to dull the edge.

Do you find that the surface becomes sticky when you polish up to that high of a finish?

 

[Martyfish]

Do you find that the surface becomes sticky when you polish up to that high of a finish?

Based upon my past experience with semi-mirror finishes, yes, they tend to become really sticky due to a partial vacuum effect suctioning food on to the blade. In this case I'm planning to apply a kasumi finish on the cladding, which I hope will effectively negate the stickiness. I haven't cut anything with the blade in it's current condition, because it has no edge and this is just a temporary state until I get around to the kasumi, but I expect it would be sticky as hell.

 

[thesquidler]

Love the work on the Mazaki! When you did the spine and choil polishing, did you start with something heavier like files to break the edges or go right to sandpaper? I don't remember Maz KU being very rounded stock, so I expect it needed some good work there. Then I assume shoe-shine style sandpaper progression?

 

[Martyfish]

Love the work on the Mazaki! When you did the spine and choil polishing, did you start with something heavier like files to break the edges or go right to sandpaper? I don't remember Maz KU being very rounded stock, so I expect it needed some good work there. Then I assume shoe-shine style sandpaper progression?

Thanks . I rounded the spine using a hand-held wood working belt sander mounted in a support fixture and basically just rocked the knife by raising and lowering the edge until it had a nice radius. I rounded the choil using a dremel, and the polishing on both the spine and choil was done using sandpaper and the shoe shining motion, as you said.

 

[thesquidler]

Thanks . I rounded the spine using a hand-held wood working belt sander mounted in a support fixture and basically just rocked the knife by raising and lowering the edge until it had a nice radius. I rounded the choil using a dremel, and the polishing on both the spine and choil was done using sandpaper and the shoe shining motion, as you said.

Interesting. I don't have access to a small belt sander like that, but I do have a Dremel and never thought of using that. Did you use a sandpaper wheel or one of the silicone carbide/aluminum oxide stones (or something else)? Glad I asked, this could save me some time in the future. Thanks

 

[Martyfish]

Interesting. I don't have access to a small belt sander like that, but I do have a Dremel and never thought of using that. Did you use a sandpaper wheel or one of the silicone carbide/aluminum oxide stones (or something else)? Glad I asked, this could save me some time in the future. Thanks

I rounded the choil with a diamond grinding attachment that is marketed as something for trimming dogs nails followed by scratch depth reduction using a fine sanding drum and then sandpaper. Here is a link to the product of you're interested:

https://amzn.eu/d/0uTgq3y

A Dremel can really speed things up, but you need to be careful about removing material evenly and slipping can create problems that totally offset any time saving you have made, so take it slow and be careful.

 

[thesquidler]

I rounded the choil with a diamond grinding attachment that is marketed as something for trimming dogs nails followed by scratch depth reduction using a fine sanding drum and then sandpaper. Here is a link to the product of you're interested:

https://amzn.eu/d/0uTgq3y

A Dremel can really speed things up, but you need to be careful about removing material evenly and slipping can create problems that totally offset any time saving you have made, so take it slow and be careful.

Great use of the doggy nail file lol. Yeah I'll definitely give this some more thought regarding where and when this might be appropriate. I try to stay away from power tools and knives, just due to the potential to screw things up.

 

[Martyfish]

Yoshikane Spa Day Part 2: More Polishing and Building a Foundation for the Kasumi

I refinished the cladding over the weekend with the aim of laying a good foundation for a finger stone kasumi. I basically just evened out the scratch pattern using P600 and P800 grit sandpaper and even with the sandpaper finish, it already has some acceptable contrast, as shown below.

Unfortunately I was not very good at colouring in between the lines (keeping the sandpaper away from the mirror polished core steel) and as a consequence I reintroduced some unwanted scratches to mirror polish, which can be seen in the image below if you zoom in.

The transition to the tsuchime area also presented challenge when working with sandpaper, because I could not remove the scratches there while maintaining a sharp transition. My plan going forward is to remove the scratches at the transition to the tsuchime on a Naniwa Pro 800, taking advantage of the change in geometry to remove the scratches while maitinaing the sharp transition. This will be followed by cleaning up the cladding a bit using sandpaper and then to redoing the mirror finish on the core steel. The order that I did the polishing in was certainly suboptimal in this case, because I am going to have to repeat several of the polishing processes. Oh well, room for improvement next time.

More refinishing to come.

 

[Martyfish]

Yoshikane Spa Day Part 3: More Polishing, Marco Images and Kasumi

After many hours invested, I am finally finished giving my Yoshikane a face lift. I'm really happy with the end result and the performance boost from the thinning should have it back to cutting like it did out of the box. Be sure to view the video in 720p, or it will look like a potato.

This was one of the more challenging knife makeovers that I have undertaken, because there are quite a few distinct elements to the blade (the mirror finished core, the kasumi and the tsuchime). Keeping the finishes within their individual areas proved to be more challenging than anticipated and more difficult in comparison to refinishing san mai migaki or kasumi blades without a third component (tsuchime, kurouchi, nashiji, etc.). I used various finishing mediums and methods, including whetstones (thinning and scratch reduction on the core steel), sandpaper (refinishing the cladding), loose abrasives (mirror polishing the core and laying the foundation for the kasumi) and finger stones (the final kasumi), so it was a really good learning experience and a good opportunity to try new things.

A brief summary of the various finishes and finishing processes can be found below:

• Core steel: mirror polished with the following progression: Naniwa Pro 800 Naniwa Pro 3000 28 micron diamond paste ... ... 0.5 micron diamond paste.
• Cladding:
  1. Kasumi foundation layed with P320 P600 P800 grit sandpaper F360 grit silicon carbide / Windex slurry applied with 0000 steel wool.
  2. Final kasumi: Uchigomori finger stones for the base kasumi and contrast F360 grit silicon carbide / mineral oil slurry applied with a cotton makeup pad to clean the finish up a bit.
• Tsuchime: smoothing out the sandpaper transition area with a F360 grit silicon carbide / Windex slurry applied with 0000 steel wool.

I also took some macro images of the mirror polished core steel, the semi-mirror polished area above the core steel, the kasumi foundation, the final kasumi and the tsuchime area to see what they looked like on a microscopic level. The mirror finish is relatively close to perfect when viewed with the naked eye and to my surprise, it was also pretty clean under the microscope.

Some random observations (mainly for me in the future so that I can remember some finer details and lessons learned):

• It is difficult to match the grit rating of whetstones or sandpaper with diamond compounds when transitioning between polishing mediums. I expect the reason for this is different binders / backings and applicators.
• When using the diamond pastes, the rate of abrasion did not really seem to correlate with grit size, based upon how quickly the cotton makeup pad discoloured with the abraded metal.
• Finger stones do not guarantee a good kasumi. They will struggle to reach small localised low spots, even if glued to a backing, scored and cracked so that they can contour to curved surfaces. If they are scored and cracked, then you need to be careful to not introduce scratches from sharp corners at the edges of the cracks.
• Finger stones abrade very quickly and tend to abrade faster in the middle where the pressure is applied.
• Uchigomori finger stones leave quite a dark kasumi.
• Kiita finger stones leave a brighter kasumi.
• Cleaning the finger stone kasumi up with silicon carbide powder helps to make it more even and consistent, but it brightens the kasumi marginally.