Thread: First hand sanding process and question...

Hello all...
So I'm throwing myself headlong into restoration, but I'm normally cautious to a fault...so I thought my for my first "blade restoration" I would start with something far more substantial than a razor and worked on my grandfather's old boot knife (sorry for the crappy picture and no before picture). It was pretty grey, some scratches, pits and a tiny bit of rust...But I think it turned out decent. I hand-sanded, starting with 180 and worked up to 3000...then used Maas

My question is, there are still some scratches visible in parts because i think I did what everyone said not to do and moved on to the next grit before removing the previous grit's scratches. So I'm going to go at it again, but should I start back at 220 or can I skip to 400 or 600?

Thanks!

It depends when u left the scratches on, i would go back to 220, just to make sure u get all of them( that is of course if u want to get rid of all the scratches,sometimes I just live with em ) also another good way to tell is to start sanding from left to right, then on the next grit sand up and down or in circles that way u can tell when to move up in grits even from the pic it looks pretty good to me , congrats !!

You should drop down to the grit where you first decided to proceed without having removed all scratches. So if they are 180 grit scratches, drop down to 220.

When you are sanding with e.g. 220, the scratch lines are e.g. 180. of all the sandpaper you will use from that point forward, nothing will remove them faster than the 220 grit. If you go higher 1 step, it will already take much longer to remove those scratches. Skipping ahead too soon will just mean that it will take longer. Or it might be futile if you've skipped ahead too much. Removing lingering 180 scratches with 800 grit paper will take eternity.