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Been a long time without a real project... Well there was the Kaji-Bei a few months ago, and possibly THAT would be considered more of a real project than what comes next... however the Kaji-Bei is a 200$ CAD knife, so with a modicum of experience one just... goes at it how one sees fit without much of extra care or second thoughts.


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Twice the price Wakui however, now 1 year + with me (time flies!!), was a project I knew inevitable sooner or later if I didn't sell it, and one I've been looking forward to. Well I didn't sell it, and decided it was time for "maintenance thinning". Very little to do in fact in terms of thinning but a first go at polishing the wide bevel, and I wanted it to be neat. Taped the faces even where I wasn't so worried of either the stones at hand or consistency of the wide bevel - just maniacally wanted to ensure looks would keep kosher.


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Nanohone 200: fast (for good knives) and tidy. It was little work getting both sides done, an easy check before the next stone in line, where final thinning would be dealt with, and the real polishing would begin. Not that the Nanohone isn't a good start in that regard, especially if you spend a little more time with it...


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... yet Cerax 320 would at once allow me to paint an even better start yet while being that much more comfy and tactile getting the bevel and BTE how I wanted. Still dealt with speed in mind - about 15 minutes required. I don't care much for stray scratches from it especially with iron clad. Tape was removed from there on - next stones mud nowhere coarse enough to inflict any discoloration to the KU-Nash, unless you really rub at it.

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A little bit of extra work at the tip, not entirely erasing my last microbevel (quite acute as a last resort to the BTE getting irremediably thick) but almost. More of it kept towards the heel.
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And the choil shot now slightly thinner...
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... than it got to me in the first place OOTB. Can still see the remnant of my last micro-bevel. I saw no point getting it extra thin... yet. Separation was as good as could be expected OOTB anyhow. Preservation work here, if you will.



But... most of the stop here is how good Cerax 700 can be - in my use. Which is no bragging... see next post.
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I said... "in my use"... for there's a cheap dirty trick.

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#320 sandpad. The other piece was intended to give a refresh to the handle. A single piece of this size suffice for what I have in mind when polishing with stones. Used scarcely out of Cerax 320 helped with its mud, used more extensively out of Cerax 700. Blending mostly using the same direction than the stone strokes, but I always do the last of any step with it using perpendicular to edge strokes.

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As I say, very little could be done from there and call it a day.

But I went further, using Cerax 1K which has seen seldom polishing action yet and had me still curious about it. Encountered some slight problems - Cerax 1K tend to load and discolor from carbon steel/iron clads, and as soon as the stone gets there, you can say bye bye to its abilities. My first go at it was almost perfect, but a few spots I wanted to get as good... but I didn't resurface.

Ah well, I went to Ouka and could call it a day still. Used the now quite finer #320 sandpad and oil to get a bit more of a hue

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... bathing in oil...

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Well of course there are scratches! I'm not a polisher, just a guy with a fast prog to a quite workable finish.

Also a look at the new Atoma 140... which I've had for nearly a year now, but kept using the old worned out one because it did the job.

Just showing it raised mud and flattened the Nanohone 200 without the slightest of depreciation.

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Excellent @ModRQC and thank you for posting!

I'm really impressed by how light your scratches seem to be on the low grits. Are you using much pressure?

Ah well I guess it goes down to the dirty trick! Look at the shot out of Nanohone or even Cerax 320, where none or little of the trick was used.

But still I guess experience helps a bit. You talked about pressure. Well once upon a time I just went crazy forcefully on coarse stones. Of course it was fast and my BTE got crazy thin, but... It's not how they should be used however. Mud and lighter pressure is a must. But also learning to apply the most pressure BTE. Sort of using the clad line as the pressure point. Carbon core will always be keener to get polished than the cladding. With SS clad the notion is crucial, but even with iron clad it helps a lot.
 
Ah well I guess it goes down to the dirty trick! Look at the shot out of Nanohone or even Cerax 320, where none or little of the trick was used.

But still I guess experience helps a bit. You talked about pressure. Well once upon a time I just went crazy forcefully on coarse stones. Of course it was fast and my BTE got crazy thin, but... It's not how they should be used however. Mud and lighter pressure is a must. But also learning to apply the most pressure BTE. Sort of using the clad line as the pressure point. Carbon core will always be keener to get polished than the cladding. With SS clad the notion is crucial, but even with iron clad it helps a lot.

Thanks dude. That's actually quite helpful.
 
Ah BTW also helps with keeping a convex if you must or creating one. But @ian and others have already pointed this out and for this geometry it was of little use. Should have said that the Wakui was mostly a very very straight affair.
 
Depends on where you position yourself scratch wise. I never went to boast that any of my results dealt with all of them. I once followed either a tighter prog or more blending to get there more closely, but really when you get that at some point you're loosing benefits (sucky finish) with either too fine of a stone/sandpad for a few scratches that won't hinder any of the cutting... I've so treated most of my more or less crude Migaki vertical finishes with clad line pressure, lazy not so fine polishing and rather coarse perpendicular to edge finish because that's how they behaved so good in separation to start with... and I don't care how they look as much as very precisely the cutting feeling I liked them for in the first place - just enhanced. Got even lazier and less worried after thinning a Sukenari HAP-40 - not only the SS cladding but the very hard core and the typical too flat Sukenari grind quite difficult to improve upon AND get a great polish upon at the same time with minimal involvment.

So also hours of work willing to invest for a project vs. real benefits except being temporarily amazed by the level of finish obtained - to be completely forgotten at best, cursed upon at worse, in use - have long lost interest to me. But I'd get it if anyone was of a different mind. Need to adjust to what you're seeking for.
 
Unsolicited advice. Don't take up razor honing. It'll turn you into an obsessive weirdo.

Speaking on behalf of a friend.
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How do you find razor honing? I expected it to be super challenging based on all the stuff I’d read an borderline violent arguments had about it online. I personally just didn’t find it that hard… angle guide is pretty much built in after all
 
How do you find razor honing? I expected it to be super challenging based on all the stuff I’d read an borderline violent arguments had about it online. I personally just didn’t find it that hard… angle guide is pretty much built in after all
Getting to "good enough" was easy for exactly the reason you say. Getting to HHT 4/5 appears to be my Achilles heel. 👠
Best guess so far is I need a cleaner set bevel. Or a stone between 8/10k and the Arks. Hard to know for sure.

I mean, my friend needs to do those things.
 
How do you find razor honing? I expected it to be super challenging based on all the stuff I’d read an borderline violent arguments had about it online. I personally just didn’t find it that hard… angle guide is pretty much built in after all
the only difficult things about razor honing are knowing when you are finished with a stone and ready to move onto the next, and dealing with razors with geometry issues(rolling x strokes are your friend here). synthetics make things braindead easy. hard jnats have a learning curve.

i find knife sharpening to be harder but thats probably because ive spent WAY more time with razors.
 
That's a pretty killer edge. May I ask how you got there? (Asking for a friend)
with the usb microscope i use, the edges look black when they are highly polished.

i used to use the above pictures to illustrate the difference between razors finished on synths with high polish and naturals that leave a more matte/hazy finish. both shave very well.

top picture is a naniwa 12k edge under fairly high magnification. bottom picture is a hard jnat finished on misty slurry. both pics are from about 6 years ago. if i ever get a chance to dig through my comp in the living room ill try to find some other pics. i had a massive library of bevel pics finished on various naturals. jnats/coti's/eschers/ark's etc as well as a bunch of synth finishers/progression stones and lapping film. basically a little bit of everything.
 
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