Scales in progress

Making some scales for my Gold Dollar razors.

Got seven sanded to shape with 100 grit paper in persimmon, walnut, cherry, oak, tulip poplar, maple, canarywood, and bloodwood.

Need to work on the ends a bit to get rid of the scratches from the belt sander. Will sand them up to 1 um finish paper in the next couple days and start on finish, not sure what I'll use. I've done some in Helmsman Urethane, but got some quick dry polyurethane and teak oil finish the other day to see how those work.

Peter

Nice selection of woods, they look real nice. Make sure you post the finished product!

Subscribed! The bloodwood is new to me. I like it. I bet those look great when they're done. Best of luck!

Four coats of fast dry polyurethane. Since I have dust issues, and don't really like mirror finish wood anyway, I will rub them down with 4F pumice to kill the gloss and remove and surface issues, and polish back up with rottenstone and green compound to restore most of the gloss. Will take a couple days for the finish to be hard enough for that though.

Pinned the wedge in the oak one, will be using them on a Worcester razor with broken scales this evening. I'm using 308 Stainless infill rod, cheap enough and it rivets fine with a little more work than nickel sliver.

Peter

Buffed out to semigloss. I didn't get a picture before I started re-scaling razors, so four of them are installed already -- the oak scales are on a Torrey, persimmon and maple now contain Gold Dollar 66s, and the walnut contain a no-name Chinese blade of more normal size than a Gold Dollar. Haven't gotten it honed up completely to test it yet, but it's in progress.

They came out OK -- my first ones were too thick, so I reduced the thickness of the blanks, and ended up with the cherry and poplar too thin for some razors, I think, especially Gold Dollars. Depends on how fat you want the finished razor, I suppose.

The Canarywood is going to replace the rather motheaten horn scales on a Wade and Butcher I just got, will use the bloodwood on my Gold Dollar 208.

Peter