Hi all,
I've been working on polishing this Kippington 1095 honyaki. When I got it, the geometry was really quite nice for polishing, with only extremely minimal low spots in places that matter, and a lovely convex all over. So, I only really dropped down to a Chosera 800 for the initial work, going lower than that only on a couple spots on the back that won't matter so much for food release, while keeping them convex. Anyway, since the Chosera, I jumped up briefly to Gessh 2k and 6k just to lighten the scratch pattern a bit, and then spent a bunch of time on this uchimugori I got from
@nutmeg. I think it's on the coarser side of uchimugoris, although it's the only one I've tried.
Technique-wise, what I'm doing on the uchi is laying the blade face on the stone with the edge toward me, putting my hands on the blade on either side of the stone with my fingers wrapped over the spine and my thumbs near the edge and directly over the stone, and going back and forth with wobble strokes over the full width of the convex geometry. I've tried with various amounts of water. A medium amount of water seems to work best, whatever that means.
It looks ok now, but not amazing. I'm not going for a true mirror polish (I don't know that that's really possible with this stone.) But I just want something that's even and looks good. Any suggestions on how to improve? Here are some vids I took trying to capture the scratches.
And here's the uchi.
View attachment 87353
I have some fingerstones too, also from
@nutmeg, but they just seem to scratch the blade up when I use them and don't seem to improve the finish. They worked quite well on clad knives though. There's a low spot right underneath the maker's mark that I didn't want to fix, for fear of damaging the feather, so I'll have to figure out some way to get that to look more even too. Was hoping to use the fingerstones, but maybe something else will work.
Help!