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Old 09-08-2015, 10:53 AM
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Hunter10139 Hunter10139 is offline
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Join Date: May 2012
Location: Northern Alabama
Posts: 396
I have a couple questions. First, are you making one from scratch or making a kit knife? Second, what kind of polish are you wanting exactly, mirror or satin finish? Hopefully you aren't aiming for a mirror finish on your first project since it will likely get the crap scratched out of anyways and all your hard work will be for nothing.

I don't have any experience with bolsters as I don't care for them, however, for your blade and handle you'll likely need to finish them off with hand sanding rather than a belt sander. Some people use buffing wheels to put a mirror polish on a blade and to shine up their handle, but it isn't necessary for either and many of us don't like a mirror finish on a blade anyways. This means that your sander will mainly have three potential purposes, shaping the profile of the knife, grinding the bevels of the blade, and shaping your handle. For under 100 dollars, you can get a 1x30 that will perform the profiling of the blade and the shaping of the handle, but it's going to be difficult to get a good bevel grind with a 1x30. In fact, I believe I've only seen one guy on this forum have good success grinding bevels with a 1x30, and that's PoolQs(sorry if I omitted anyone else skilled with the 1x30, it was unintentional). If you are planning on attempting to grind bevels with this sander, I would say look for the sander in your price range that is of the highest quality you can find. If you are just shaping your profile and rough shaping your handle, harbor freight sells a 1x30 for 30 bucks that will perform those tasks just fine.


Edit: Correction, the harbor freight sander is $45.00 now. I think it was 30 when I got one a couple years ago but who knows.


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Last edited by Hunter10139; 09-08-2015 at 10:56 AM.
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