Restoring a completely rusty kitchen cleaver

I am sure that many of you have found antique knives, forks, dishes, etc. in your life. So I, sorting through the rubble in an old barn, found a kitchen cleaver, or rather its blade, since the handle had long rotted. It was in a terrible and almost unusable condition. Anyone else in my place would simply throw it in the trash and that's it. But I decided to give it a second life.

As you can see, the entire blade of the cleaver is so badly rusted that the shells in unfinished areas are almost 2 mm deep. And it is generally not known how thick the knife was originally.

Restoring a rusty meat knife

We clamp the knife with a clamp on a piece of wood to the table.

And we begin to process the angle grinder. Sand one side first.

Next we finish it on a belt sander.

To ensure that the blade is without jagged edges, we grind down the cutting edge.

After prolonged rough processing, the cleaver looks like this.

Next, grind with a wheel with the finest grit.

We process the hole using a drill, drilling out all the rust.

The cleaver is ready for polishing.

Apply polishing paste.

And polish it with a soft wheel until it shines.

Shines like new.

Making a pen

Now you need to make a handle for the knife. To do this, take a dense tree and draw the outline of the future handle on it with a pencil.

Let's cut along the contour.

Let's cut it in half.

Use a chisel to make a groove for the handle of the blade.

We dilute the epoxy resin. Coat the groove generously and place the blade handle into the recess.

We glue the second half of the wooden handle on top and clamp it with a clamp.

After the epoxy resin has dried and hardened, we clamp the cleaver in a vice through a piece of wood so as not to leave marks on the blade.
We process the handle, giving it the desired shape.

Finally, sand until smooth.

Then we saturate the wood with drying oil.

The last stage is sharpening the cutting edge to a razor sharpness. This is all done on a stone with minimal crumbs, moistened with water.

Refurbished cleaver

Cuts paper like a razor. Exactly what is needed!

The cleaver has been restored.

As you can see, untreated shells are clearly visible on the shiny canvas - traces of corrosion. To remove them you need to grind down the knife significantly. I did not do this and removed the optimal layer from the blade. I don't think this will affect the cutting quality.