I bought a dagger from Bohemond a while back, which is no longer listed in his store. It’s a nice rondel style blade, unsharpened. It doesn’t have that round point that you’d need for harness fighting, which I prefer. Because it has the actual shape of a rondel instead of the blunted off tip, but has nothing even resembling an edge anywhere, it’s a safe demo tool that can be shared with kids or unintelligent-adults without too much worry of grievous bodily harm.
Last night I had the polishing bug, and decided to spruce up the shynbalds I hate to wear, not because I like them, but because I think I can resell them for profit if they can double as enemy-blinding offensive tools. However, I burnt through all my dremel tool cutting discs and couldn’t get the buckles off the shynbalds, and decided to polish the blade of my dagger instead. Point was, I had a desperate need to make something shiny; so I did.
At first I just assumed the original finish would just need some sprucing up, and I spent about thirty minutes prepping it for the buffing wheel, only to notice deep tool marks and visible scratches that run the length of the blade. They were uniform, and were likely from the final grind, but were never burnished away. Some were fairly deep, so I want back to the lowest grit I could find and worked it on up too as bright a polish I could muster.
I’m reasonably satisfied with the look. The blade was either peened on, or it’s threaded and glued, because I couldn’t take it apart with my bare hands. Because of that, the area right at the hand guard isn’t as clean as the rest. I also spent no time on the handle itself either. I’ve never had great success getting bright finishes around protuberances.
One thing I’ve learned is to spend more time on the lower grits, There were still nicks and small pits that weren’t smoothed out completely, but I couldn’t really see them until I hit the buffing wheel and brought out a clear shine.
All told, I’m confident in how much improvement I’m making in polishing skills. It was a great way to spend a couple hours listening to music and zoning out, too.
