I recently picked up a 40 straight lot on eBay of which I kept about half and resold the others in a lot that were either too small for my preference or required too much restoration work.
You might ask then, why'd I keep this one?
I wanted to see if I could take something that I probably wouldn't even pay $5 for in an antique store and turn it into something special. This W&B was in that lot and met my requirements for being rusted completely over with sever pitting everywhere and a large enough grind that I could remove a lot of metal and that pitting.
After 15 minutes on 80 greaseless I almost just gave up, but pressed on (wish I would have taken a picture at this point when the rust was off to show how much pitting there was). Anyway, I spent a good 1.5 hours on 80 greaseless and overall about 3 hours on the blade to bring it up to a mirror. No pitting remains anywhere except for a small portion on the tang. I think I only lost about 1/16" also as it went from a 7/8 to a 13/16 at the widest point. I was also as careful as possible to try to keep the tang stamp intact and only lost part of the "Wade", but kept most of the "Manufactured", "Butcher" and "Sheffield"
I was shocked at the transformation and decided to give it a new set of black horn scales with a brass lined black micarta wedge.
I honed this up last night and finished it on my newest HAD addition - a frankonian hone for olivia seife. The shave was one of my best. Not sure if it was the W&B steel or the Frankonian, but I was impressed. This sucker is definitely staying in my shave den for a long time.
Feels good to take something that could be relegated to the trash and turn it into one of my most impressive shavers.
Anyway, here are the pics.
Before:
After:
You might ask then, why'd I keep this one?
I wanted to see if I could take something that I probably wouldn't even pay $5 for in an antique store and turn it into something special. This W&B was in that lot and met my requirements for being rusted completely over with sever pitting everywhere and a large enough grind that I could remove a lot of metal and that pitting.
After 15 minutes on 80 greaseless I almost just gave up, but pressed on (wish I would have taken a picture at this point when the rust was off to show how much pitting there was). Anyway, I spent a good 1.5 hours on 80 greaseless and overall about 3 hours on the blade to bring it up to a mirror. No pitting remains anywhere except for a small portion on the tang. I think I only lost about 1/16" also as it went from a 7/8 to a 13/16 at the widest point. I was also as careful as possible to try to keep the tang stamp intact and only lost part of the "Wade", but kept most of the "Manufactured", "Butcher" and "Sheffield"
I was shocked at the transformation and decided to give it a new set of black horn scales with a brass lined black micarta wedge.
I honed this up last night and finished it on my newest HAD addition - a frankonian hone for olivia seife. The shave was one of my best. Not sure if it was the W&B steel or the Frankonian, but I was impressed. This sucker is definitely staying in my shave den for a long time.
Feels good to take something that could be relegated to the trash and turn it into one of my most impressive shavers.
Anyway, here are the pics.
Before:
After:
