Restore an Old Knife

I turned an old crappy knife into an old nice knife!

My boss told me that an old widow brought this knife into the shop and gave it to him, saying that it was her husband's - who was a butcher and that she wanted the knife to stay in the butcher business. It's an old Dexter 8" boning knife - it's not terribly nice, rare, or exotic, and you can see that this thing has been used a lot (I'm sure that the blade started it's life as wide as the handle, but after years of sharpening it's been worn down). My boss offered it to me, and mostly because I wanted a boning knife bigger than my existing 6" and I like high carbon steel (all of the rust/corrosion on the blade is clear evidence that this has a high carbon blade) I took it.

One of my co-workers commented on seeing it "holy [explicative], if the Health Inspector saw that in this shop they'd shut us down." Suffice it to say, it looked like crap.

First thing I did was sand blast this thing. I was a little reluctant because I didn't know how the rosewood handle would stand up to sandblasting, but I figured what the heck.

As you can see from the picture, the results were good. It left a pretty typical sand-blast finish on the blade: clean, but a very dull luster.

I was pleased that the handle was just fine in the sandblaster. I don't really know the properties of rosewood - perhaps a different wood wouldn't fare so well, but at any rate the sandblasting worked wonders on the handle: took the gunk and crap off and left nice, clean wood. Plus it left a good finish (good for a knife, that is): not too smooth - textured for grip, and certainly not too rough.

As I mentioned, high carbon steel is notorious for corroding, and typical high carbon steel has a naturally dull finish to it.

But I'm like a raccoon - I like shiny objects. I wanted a shiny knife. So I started shining it, first with coarse steel wool, then fine steel wool. It may be difficult to see from this pic, but the steel wool worked a bit, but certainly didn't put a high luster on it. I probably worked for 10 or 20 mins with the steel wool to get the results that you see.

After the steel wool, I used some 400 grit, then 600 grit sandpaper (both with water). I probably spent 20 mins with each grit of sandpaper. You can start to see some good luster.

Then I spent about 30 mins buffing with a clean cotton terrycloth towel that was slightly damp. This was incredibly dangerous - although the blade wasn't sharp, this knife did have a rather pointy end that would've easily pierced my hand. I emerged unscathed, but I wouldn't recommend doing what I did. Prolly much safer, easier, and better results using a polishing wheel on a bench grinder.

At any rate, I put a pretty high luster on it - not quite a mirror shine, but approaching that.

Clearly a butcher's knife needs to be sharp. I prefer mine razor sharp.

I'm not going to get into any details of sharpening a knife - there are plenty of instructables, videos, and such with instructions and explanations.

Look at that thing shine!

I made it at [restored it at] TechShop - check it out: techshop.ws

Update:

It's a pretty good knife, it glides through meat, cuts through silverskin like it's nothing. As far as the patina on the blade goes, after about a week of use it oxidized as I kinda figured would happen. You can see from the pictures that it's not too bad, but it's certainly not as shiny as when I was immediately done with the restoration.