Thread: An update - Cleaning blades: Steel wool vs Sandpaper

This thread is kind of an update to an old thread, which I posted here:
http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...ternative.html
And the short story is 000 with MAAS is the winner.

I haven't done much razor related, and no restoration at all, in quite some time. But given that I've just started my winter vacation and was finding myself a bit bored, I decided to pull out some blades and play around a little. I won't be using any power tools for some time (new apartment), so I thought I'd experiment with hand powered items I have on hand.

After digging around a bit, I came across some wet/dry sand paper and my trusty old synthetic steel wool. The lowest grit sandpaper I came across was 600, a I figure that unless you are trying to take out pitting, that might be where you start. Remember, the title was cleaning, not restoring. Anyway, I did the front sides of a few different blades with the 600 grit, experimenting with dry, mineral oil, MAAS, and water. I then did the front and back together of each with MAAS and 000 synthetic steel wool. No pics to show this time around, but the sandpaper sides were never cleaner (they do about the same on the deeper devil's spit, but clean up the shallow stuff and surface rust nicely) and always had deeper scratches. So it seems that, if you just want to do a light cleaning, meaning removing surface rust and cleaning out shallow pits, without doing a ton of work to remove any scratch marks you leave behind, 000 synthetic steel wool and MAAS will work better and MUCH faster than sandpaper. No jumping through grits, no chasing scratch marks, and no wearing through sandpaper.

Dylan, have you ever worked with Micromesh?

Yes, I have micromesh, but could only find down to 2400 and only have down to 1500. I really like the 1500 as a starting point for tangs, tails, and spines. It's awesome that you can just wash them off and not lose the grit, too.

Here is a Henckles Platinum before and after. 15-20 minutes with a WD40 hose down, a bamboo coffee stir stick, paper towel and 0000 steel wool.

No polish yet, just cleaning. All gunk between scales is now gone.

A bit of wet and dry and a few minutes on the buffer will bring out a shine further.

A quick cleaning.