Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba part 3

Now at last I can start proper sharpening and polishing that blade.

Beston 500:

JNS 1000:

White Binsui with nagura:

I have to send those knives tommorow before 1 pm so I have to wake up early again and finish sharpening. Only two stones left: Red Aoto and Oohira Tomae. I think that finish after Oohira will be very nice and I won't have to worry about scratching jigane because there is no jigane. After all it is Honyaki:D TBC...

Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba - mirror polishing part 2

Hello!

I was doing mirror polish from early morning today. I decided to start from from 320 grit sand paper to remove those deep scratches. As you can see sides of that flat surface are more polished because it isn't flat.

This is a picture of today's polishing on 320 grit paper. Unfortunately I ran out of that grit and the next one I had was 800grit. This is big gap and it is worrying me.

Here you can still see some original scratches. They are not very deep now.

And here you have a picture after 800 grit paper which unfotunately ran out as well. I have to say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread and now I run out of the sanding paper and I can only use polishing mops. I knew what will happen now but you will see yourself.

There is a picture after first polishing compound. I didn't notice that it's not focused but now it's too late to change anything. It started to has a nice mirror finish.

Blue compound:

Here you can see something I was worried about. If you don't spend enough time on low grits then you will not be able to fix it later on. You can see very nice mirror finish here but with lot of scratches from sanding paper. 

Here you can see effect after yellow compound. If you look on good angle there is almost perfect mirror finish but scratches are now very visible. I will continue tommorow. TBC.

Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba - mirror polish

Hello again.
I couldn't resist to ask owner of that blade about mirror polishing flat part of the blade. It was screaming about it and I decided to give it a go. I thought that I will start from polishing compounds straight away but after 3 mintues I gave up. I must prepare that part for final polishing. The point is that first kanji is hand made and it is not very deep. This is a reason why I am a liitle afraid about removing metal from that part.

Second kanji is stamped and it is quite deep so I don't have to worry about it. Here you can see some original grind scratches which I have to remove before polishing. They doesn't look like but they are very deep.

I have used small DMT diamond plate as a base and wrapped 320 grit sandpaper with felt baking.

Also I've read somewhere that it is good to use glass cleaner instead of water when using sand paper. I've tried it when I was removing low spots on diamonds and it worked well. I gave it a try with sandpaper.

That part of knife is not perfect flat, as someone would say, so I was removing metal from sides. It is little concaved in the middle. Anyway it started to reflexing some light.

I didn't have more time today because of my day time work but I will wake up earlier tommorow just to spend more time on polishing. Once I remove original scratches I will start polishing with compounds. It shouldn't take a lot of time. TBC

 

Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba part 2

Hello.

I continued my work on Masamoto today at the morning. It took me about 2,5 - 3 hours to remove all low spots. There is one very small on the heel but it doesn't affect anything. The whole blade is even now. To be honest the grind of Masamoto helps here a lot especially in front part of the blade and because of that I could focus on grinding. There is one very important thing about sharpening the blade road. I am usually using force when I push forward. Today i did it the other way around. I have used force only on back motion obviously with fingers on shinogi line. I think that this in theory rised shinogi line a bit and it helped me to remove low spots. Actually the rise of shinogi is unnoticable.

Here you can see even finish on the whole blade. Tommorow I will start proper sharpening and blade road polishing. TBC

Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba

Hi.

So now it's time for Masamoto Honyaki 300mm White#2 Yanagiba. This knife is more like a sword. It need some time and work but I am going to show him some love.

Ok so first of all I must repair tip of the knife. Actually I don't now the reason why it's broken but when I opened a package from person who send me it it was already broken and that person don't remember that it was broken before he send it. I believe that just happened in transport because those blades were wrapped in few layers of paper and send in envelope. Anyway I have to fix it.

I have marked area which I have to remove with pencil. I didn't wanted to remove steel from edge because I had to maintain original profile. I started with beston 500 but i quickly swap to some cheap diamonds. After that i just spend few minutes with Beston again to finish it.

It took me maybe 20 minutes to fix it. Now it's not very pointy and thin so maybe it won't brake again in the future until somebody hit anything.

I managed to find another few minutes, before i went to my work, to check that there is no grind issues. As usual I covered whole blade with marker pen to see any low spots.

As you can see I was grinding steel only from edge and shinogi line which means that there is concave in the middle of the blade road. That is a big surprise and disappointment because in high-end knife for that price, I believe that it's about 950$, grind should be perfect. I didn't have more time today but I will work on it tommorow. I hope that it won't take ages to make it even.