Buffing compound for strops

[hivemind]

Back when I used to work in a musical instrument repair shop, we used the red stuff for buffing brass instruments before lacquering them.

[hidepounder]

I was reading a knifemakers catalog today and reading about rouges....they had a pink they were touting for final finishes. Just thought I'd throw that in to make a complicated subjet more complicated!

Bob

[Rawhide]

I was reading a knifemakers catalog today and reading about rouges....they had a pink they were touting for final finishes. Just thought I'd throw that in to make a complicated subjet more complicated!

Bob

Damn it Bob! I thought you were my friend...Now you go and complicate things.

[hidepounder]

Damn it Bob! I thought you were my friend...Now you go and complicate things.

It's crazy isn't it? I'm such a sucker for this stuff.....anything to make it brighter and shinier and sharper! It's like buying fishing lures....."maybe this will catch the big one!"

[laney1566]

I would like to know if all rouges are rock hard like the white sticks that Tandy sells. Is there something softer out there that can be rubbed into a strop easier?

[kevinhopkins]

Hi... For what it's worth, Ben's got it all pretty much right. The rouge that you use really doesn't matter Too much..... Depending on what you're doing with it. If it's for your swivel knife, usually red or white is best, with white being the fastest cutting, so that it only requires a few strops to get a blade with the proper angle slick again. The trick is to make sure that your blade has a proper angle on it to start with. The reason that Tandy only sells the white stuff is because of people like me.... I have a hard time being neat, and it seemed like everytime that I used the red rouge, I would get some itty bitty pc of it on my leather!!!! And it don't come off! White solved that problem, and slicked up my knife with just a lick or two. As to the Aluminum oxide, tin oxide, cerium oxide, and whatever other oxides, they'll all sharpen a blade to a varying degrees depending on how you use them. If I was a knife maker, and wanted to make a knife that would split frog hairs, I'd go thru all the steps to sharpen that knife. But if I'm carving leather, a little pc of leather with a bit of white rouge on it will get me by for quite a while, or at least until I drop my dumb knife!

Kevin Hopkins

[hidepounder]

I guess this would be my effort to try to tie a confusing issue to a practical application. If you are selecting a rouge to use for touching up your swivel knife, an aggessive cutting compound is probably counter-productive. The drag you feel when cutting leather is caused from a chemical reaction between the steel and the residual chemicals present in the leather, resulting a crystaline build-up on the blade. In this instance you only want to remove that build-up in order to continue cutting smoothly. The more aggressive the rouge used during this process, the more quickly the blade is dulled due to our inablility to maintain the same angle while stropping. Conversely, when actually sharpening the swivel knife blade, the use of a series of diminishing cutting compounds would be desireable, as a jig is used allowing us to maintain the same angle throughout the process, ending with a sharp, highly polished blade.

So...I guess it makes sense to have both cutting and polishing rouges on hand. Oversimplified probably, but how did I do?

Bob

Edited April 24, 2009 by hidepounder

[CampbellRandall]

For sharpening, the WHITE is normally a fine grit, and the GREEN is even finer. For a mirror finish, we recommend the green - which is our best seller. Besides the material type and grit size in the compound, some compounds will have more moisture in them, dependind on the make.

We sell the various compounds primarily for sharpening knives and beveler blades. (COMPOUND) Most of our customers buy the large green blocks and sharpen using cloth wheels on a grinder. You can also apply to strops. For a factory, the grinder method its fast and easy, although not as precise has hand sharpening. The paper wheels are a considerable improvement over the cloth wheels. In our shop we use the paper wheels for straight blades and the cloth wheels for shaped bevel knives (machine blades).

[rawhide1]

Interesting stuff!!

While digging thru a box of junk I found a tube of rouge. The brand name is Dico and it's marked as CR1. Further down it says this is for chrome (I think it's brown or a real dark red). My question to everyone is can I use this on my round knife and swivel knife and other cutting instruments. Or is there a different one I should use.

Thanks for any help, Mike

[yldbill]

I polish alot of tool steel for plastic injection molds. When we want to get a real good finish(meaning mirror) we use different color diamond compounds.It comes in a syringe and could be worked into a strop very easy. You would not want to do any major sharpening with the stuff but as a finishing polish you probably can't get anything much finer

here is alist from course to ultra fine:

Red

Blue

Green

Orange

Yellow

White