# Old Yanagiba Restoration WIP



## cotedupy (Aug 18, 2021)

Been a little while since I've done one of these, so thought I'd share some pics, because I think it's going to turn out quite nice. (I believe this is an old Seki Magoroku yanagi, though interestingly the kanji look to be engraved rather than stamped or printed. Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge might be able to shed some light...?)

It seems like a reasonably well-made knife, and the rust is pretty superficial. I think the major obstacle here is quite obvious.












Eep!

First up is to knock the handle off and give it a vinegar bath and cleanup, and then have a think about the tip.

The easy way to fix it is to take it all off the spine, as messing around with the bevel side is something of a fool's errand; fairly tricky, very long, and liable to f*** the geometry. However... if I take this down just off the spine it's going to mess with the ura, and/or give it a horrid little Santoku-type nose. And I can think of nothing more aesthetically dismal and soul-destroying than a beautiful yanagiba with a snub Santoku nose, so I'm not gong to do that. I'm going to take a bit off the spine on a belt grinder, and then even it up along the full length of the bevel on coarse stones.

This takes _quite a while_, even with my trusty Norton SiC Coarse and Fine. But we get somewhere eventually:






The ura actually looks ok I think:






And I'm quite happy with how I've got the shinogi. Playing around with the grinds and geometry of single-bevel knives isn't that easy. And I've learnt that the hard way in the past. There was one particular yanagiba that I made a stupid mistake on, and it's taken me more than ten hours I guess to correct, as well as losing quite a lot of the length of it because of that. Still, all that time spent I think has given me quite a good understanding of how to do this kind of thing, and it seems to have gone quite well here.

I've effectively now finished grinding, though I've left a small amount of the tip still to do, as I go through a proper sanding run and stone progression after this:






I've also made me up a handle blank. Red Mallee Burl, steel and vine wood spacer, and ebony ferrule:






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TBC...


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## HumbleHomeCook (Aug 18, 2021)

Very cool!


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## coxhaus (Aug 18, 2021)

Are you going to sell it? It might make a nice sushi knife for me.


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## cotedupy (Aug 18, 2021)

coxhaus said:


> Are you going to sell it? It might make a nice sushi knife for me.



Haha! I always start yanagi restorations with the intention of selling, and then end up putting so much care and effort in that I can never bring myself to. (Which is why I now have five old restored ones that we rarely use, and I just occasionally polish and admire  ). I'll make sure to give you a shout though if I do decide to.

Fingers crossed it turns out as well as my previous one, which was similarly old and rusted when I got:


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## cotedupy (Aug 27, 2021)

Thought I'd do a little more work on this in the last couple of days...

Here's the handle shaped, drilled, and just off belts:






It then gets oiled, and sanded up to about 1k for this one, though if the ferrule was horn I'd go higher.






Then I fitted it. There was no particular reason to do that at this stage as the blade still needs a load of work, but I wanted to see what it looked like, and it doesn't make much difference doing it now or later.






Some details; the spacer is two steel washers sandwiching a piece of Syrah vine wood. Vine wood has all sorts of faults in it, and pretty much always needs filling. This was filled with two part epoxy I coloured with blue mica powder.











Handles are my bread and butter, so you'd hope it'd go quite nicely. I'm pretty happy with this one .


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## cotedupy (Aug 27, 2021)

Now for the blade. I sand this on a progression up to 2k. Though I left the Ura at 800, I'm less fussed about mega-shiny ura, and I don't have the fingerstones, time, or inclination to really get the middle of them back to mint. Especially as this is in quite good shape and will work perfectly.






I then start on stones. Here I used King 800, King 1200, Cerax 3k, Maruoyama Shiro Suita.











That's basically it for the process, and it's come out rather nicely. _However... _

I will probably do one more sanding run on this, and maybe take the ura up to 2k as well. Just to get everything really nice. That wouldn't take long, but the all the work on the profile has revealed some microchipping along the edge that you can't see in the pictures above. But I've captured below.






It's quite small, and is probably the result of pitting. Though the knife works fine now, to get this out completely (and well!) is going to take going back to relatively coarse stones. It might go quite quickly with a bit of hamaguri sharpening, but it might turn out to be one of those things that needs to just wear out over time. Vamos a ver!


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## birdsfan (Aug 27, 2021)

Just beautiful work! The shiraz vine wood looks as good as a spacer as it does as a handle body. I would rate your work as right in the same league as some of the well known handle makers who check in on KKF!


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## HumbleHomeCook (Aug 27, 2021)

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing!


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## silylanjie (Aug 27, 2021)

This is really nice work. The handle you made looks amazing!


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## coxhaus (Aug 27, 2021)

I like it a lot. Thanks for sharing.


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## adam92 (Aug 27, 2021)

The handle you make looks amazing , you done really great job for restoring. Uraoshi shape is good, plenty of life still left, master level.


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## cotedupy (Aug 28, 2021)

Thanks all! I was rather happy with the way it came out.

And hopefully shows that if even an idiot like me can have a fair stab at it then probably anyone can .


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## coxhaus (Sep 18, 2021)

Have you grown tired of it yet?


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## Rotivator (Sep 18, 2021)

Excellent work


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## memorael (Sep 18, 2021)

That handle is really nice, the knife ain't bad either.


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## Dhoff (Sep 19, 2021)

how do you fill the vine wood?


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## stringer (Sep 19, 2021)

Do you need a certain kind of vine for vine wood? I have several hundred pounds of the stuff drying on a big tree in my backyard. I cut some big chunks out of the bottom to kill it. Probably going to try and pull the rest of it down in the spring.


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## cotedupy (Sep 19, 2021)

Thanks all... it's certainly a bit of a looker that one!



Dhoff said:


> how do you fill the vine wood?



I kinda carve the faults out using a couple of little tools; a meuchi eel spike, a Morihei oyster shucker, or a little sloyd knife. And then fill with 5 minute Araldite epoxy, either coloured with mica powder, or just left clear.











Here's a picture of one I'm doing atm. This shows some quite big faults/cracks before being dug out and filled. There are also numerous little eyes and knots that need the same, that one at the end in the top left of this pic for instance will need digging out:









stringer said:


> Do you need a certain kind of vine for vine wood? I have several hundred pounds of the stuff drying on a big tree in my backyard. I cut some big chunks out of the bottom to kill it. Probably going to try and pull the rest of it down in the spring.



Umm... I doubt it makes much difference tbh. The ones I use are Syrah wine grape vines, but there'd be no reason other types of vine wouldn't be good to. You'd certainly want bits that are pretty thick though; because vines are so twisty and random it can be a bit difficult to cut good pieces that are straight and long enough, which means there's quite a lot of waste. Though something I have found which might be of interest as I've seen you post about it before - the bits of vine wood offcuts I get are very good for bbq / smoking stuff over .

This is what my ones look like, vineyard was about 60 years old, and was grubbed up a bit over two years ago. Apologies for the artsy b&w picture, I just screen-grabbed it off my instagram:


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## stringer (Sep 19, 2021)

Some of my chunks are 8-10" in diameter. This is a 120 year old tree that's probably had the vine growing with it the whole time.


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## cotedupy (Sep 19, 2021)

stringer said:


> Some of my chunks are 8-10" in diameter. This is a 120 year old tree that's probably had the vine growing with it the whole time.



Ha! I think you should be grand then


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