brass Archives - Bleistift

Pollux

You might remember Lexikaliker’s blog post about Möbius+Ruppert’s new sharpeners Castor and Pollux. Well, thanks to Lexikalier’s generosity I got my hand on half of these geminis, I even got the more interesting half: the Pollux, a brass sharpener that’s producing a concave tip.

Lexikaliker has already covered all important points in his blog post about the Pollux, so I’ll keep it short and will just add a few of my impressions.

A pencil point before the blade treatment

Out of the box the sharpener did sharpen well, but it was tearing/ripping the wood more than it should. Strangely enough the graphite point was cut very well, so I am not sure what exactly caused this behaviour that only affects the wood, not the graphite part.

You can see what exactly happened in this video:

A pencil point after the blade treatment

I tried fixing it by sharpening the blade, first on a Belgian whetstone. You might have seen this stone in my videos about the Little Shaver. Unfortunately it wasn’t abrasive enough or I didn’t try long enough. I then tried my luck with Spyderco’s Sharpmaker and I got great results. After soe work on the blade the Pollux sharpened like a dream. Before working on the blade it produced shavings with holes in it, because the wood was torn. The shavings themselves had a thickness of around 0.25mm. After my blade treatment the shavings were thinner, 0.15mm thin – very thin.

Here’s a video I made after I worked on the blade:

Like Lexikaliker I measured an angle of around 18.5° for the pencil points produced by the Pollux.

The case drom my DUX DX4322 is a great fit for the Pollux — The case from my DUX DX4322 is a great fit for the Pollux

I have added the Pollux to my list of sharpeners.

Please open the images in a new tab to see them in high resolution.

Please open the videos in Youtube to watch them in 4K.

Restoring a grenade

8 Comments / Sharpeners / 11 August 2014 / brass, Granate, grenade, restore, sharpener

…the sharpener called grenade, not a real grenade.

Or should that be ‘How not to restore a grenade’? – you’ll see why.

The age and the name of this sharpener even fit with the current 100th anniversary of Britain’s involvement in WWI, which is being commemorated on a national and on a local level – with local museums and libraries in and around Preston (where I live) taking part.

The grenade sharpener design has been around since 1847 ^[1]see Lexikaliker: Granate and is still being sold today. I got a modern one, which Lexikaliker got me five years ago when I wasn’t able to get one in the UK.

Cleaning

A few days ago I also got my hands on an old version – I was lucky enough to get one for a good price.

First task: clean it. I bought the metal polish used during a previous trip to Germany, after a tip from Lexikaliker on how to clean old brass.

Problem

Unfortunately something went quite wrong. There was a band of oxidisation after I left the sharpener in the metal polish over night. It now looks as if there’s a dent where this band was. Brass is missing in this dent, which is difficult to see on the photos, but quite obvious in reality.

After cleaning. Look between the R and the A to see the problem.

I have two ideas as to what might have caused this.

The brass composition was different where this band /dent is, so the polish could ‘erode’ the material there. This explanation seems unlikely.
I shouldn’t have but the blade and the screw in the same polish. Maybe the metal somehow reacted with the polish which made it ‘corrode’ the brass.

Ok. I got to live with my mistake now, but if I ever get another chance I will keep the blade and screw separate.

Next problem: The blade. It seems slightly too short to cut into the wood. I’ll talk about that another time.

References[+]

References
↑1	see Lexikaliker: Granate

Restoring a grenade Read More »