Hiromoto - Fail of the year

Hi everybody!!

My next project is Hiromoto. The knife on the bottom is a knife I have to work on, and the top one is my own knife. Bot are Hiromoto AS 240mm gyuto. The bottom one is used in the pro kitchen. As you can see on the picture, hagane on the bottom one dissapeared. It doesn't mean that it is not there. It's core steel but it is not exposed anymore because of heavy sharpening.

 As you can see below this knife needs serious thinning. This operation will also expose core still and I hope that nice wavy line will appear.

 Due to wrong sharpening, heel of this knife is lower than rest of the edge. That's wrong because only heel is touching the cutting board and then is the gap.

 This knife will get nice Ironwood handle.

 I've started my work on the belt grinder. I have quickly stopped that because I still don't feel comfortable on the belt grinder and I continued thinning manually on the stones.

 After thinning I was looking for a quick way to repolish the blade. As you can see I used JNS 300 stone to do that. I was impressed of speed and finish. That also made me thinking, and I had a great idea. I am going to japanesenaturalstones.com gathering in Denmark and I want to cut my 300 grit stones in to thin stripes and glue them to the wooden bases. I will do that with few of my stones.

JNS 300 finish. You can notice that I exposed core steel.

 Next stone is natural Ebisu. It is good to round the corners. Unfortunately this stone cracked in half so I cannot use it for sharpening anymore, but it will be good for prepolishing.

 I was experimenting with fingerstones.
Red aoto fingerstone:

 Red aoto finish:

 Hakka:

 Afterwards I started working on the handle:

 I was asked to cover saya with varnish. The point is that I have thrown away rest of my shellac and I hadn't got a time to buy new before gathering. Instead I have sanded it down and cleaned and I cover that saya with few layers of bees wax and camelia oil. It's water resistant now.

I found crack in the pin hole. I took it out, glued it in and then sanded.

 Also I have drilled hole in the pin for the string.

And now final results:
New grind. Of course it could be thinner but I've been told that this knife is doing rock cutting in 99% of time so there is no reason to thinning it more.

So now, you could ask why there is ''Fail of the year'' in the title. It's because it was my biggest fail ever. When I showed those pictures to the knife owner, he told me that he wanted Wa handle . It had to be conversion from western handle to Japanese style handle. I have quickly checked my emails and actually 27 emails earlier I found this sentence: ''I want Japanese style handle''. You even don't know how bad I felt at that time and how sorry I was. It is sorted now, but it shouldn't happened. So treat it as a warning. Always check your emails, especially if you have hundreds of them, because there is possibility that you will loose something.
That's it at the moment. I am going to JNS gathering in 3h time so wait for new posts with gathering relation:D