Been a little while since I've done one of these, so thought I'd share some pics, because I think it's going to turn out quite nice. (I believe this is an old Seki Magoroku yanagi, though interestingly the kanji look to be engraved rather than stamped or printed. Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge might be able to shed some light...?)
It seems like a reasonably well-made knife, and the rust is pretty superficial. I think the major obstacle here is quite obvious.
Eep!
First up is to knock the handle off and give it a vinegar bath and cleanup, and then have a think about the tip.
The easy way to fix it is to take it all off the spine, as messing around with the bevel side is something of a fool's errand; fairly tricky, very long, and liable to f*** the geometry. However... if I take this down just off the spine it's going to mess with the ura, and/or give it a horrid little Santoku-type nose. And I can think of nothing more aesthetically dismal and soul-destroying than a beautiful yanagiba with a snub Santoku nose, so I'm not gong to do that. I'm going to take a bit off the spine on a belt grinder, and then even it up along the full length of the bevel on coarse stones.
This takes quite a while, even with my trusty Norton SiC Coarse and Fine. But we get somewhere eventually:
The ura actually looks ok I think:
And I'm quite happy with how I've got the shinogi. Playing around with the grinds and geometry of single-bevel knives isn't that easy. And I've learnt that the hard way in the past. There was one particular yanagiba that I made a stupid mistake on, and it's taken me more than ten hours I guess to correct, as well as losing quite a lot of the length of it because of that. Still, all that time spent I think has given me quite a good understanding of how to do this kind of thing, and it seems to have gone quite well here.
I've effectively now finished grinding, though I've left a small amount of the tip still to do, as I go through a proper sanding run and stone progression after this:
I've also made me up a handle blank. Red Mallee Burl, steel and vine wood spacer, and ebony ferrule:
---
TBC...
It seems like a reasonably well-made knife, and the rust is pretty superficial. I think the major obstacle here is quite obvious.
Eep!
First up is to knock the handle off and give it a vinegar bath and cleanup, and then have a think about the tip.
The easy way to fix it is to take it all off the spine, as messing around with the bevel side is something of a fool's errand; fairly tricky, very long, and liable to f*** the geometry. However... if I take this down just off the spine it's going to mess with the ura, and/or give it a horrid little Santoku-type nose. And I can think of nothing more aesthetically dismal and soul-destroying than a beautiful yanagiba with a snub Santoku nose, so I'm not gong to do that. I'm going to take a bit off the spine on a belt grinder, and then even it up along the full length of the bevel on coarse stones.
This takes quite a while, even with my trusty Norton SiC Coarse and Fine. But we get somewhere eventually:
The ura actually looks ok I think:
And I'm quite happy with how I've got the shinogi. Playing around with the grinds and geometry of single-bevel knives isn't that easy. And I've learnt that the hard way in the past. There was one particular yanagiba that I made a stupid mistake on, and it's taken me more than ten hours I guess to correct, as well as losing quite a lot of the length of it because of that. Still, all that time spent I think has given me quite a good understanding of how to do this kind of thing, and it seems to have gone quite well here.
I've effectively now finished grinding, though I've left a small amount of the tip still to do, as I go through a proper sanding run and stone progression after this:
I've also made me up a handle blank. Red Mallee Burl, steel and vine wood spacer, and ebony ferrule:
---
TBC...
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). I'll make sure to give you a shout though if I do decide to.
.
