Heinisch #7 14 inch shears as next project.

[hutch--]

I am supposed to be behaving myself and not buying more shears but this pair jumped up and bit me so I made a bid on them and got them for about $50.00 USD. I am reasonably well practiced at picking shears on eBay from their photos and this pair had full blades with all of the inlay and the hinge looked OK. They also had only light rust so they looked like a pair that would restore well.

They turned up today from Factoryville, Pennsylvania so I took some photos before I did anything to them.


This is the left side that shows the full blades and the general condition of the outer blades and handles.


Ditto for the right side.


The lower blade shows some wear and some surface rust but fortunately it was not deep puncturing rust that needed a lot taken off the inside face.


Much the same for the upper blade, inside face had some scale type rust but later the rust was easy enough to scrap off.

Since I took the photos I have got the hinge apart without any wreckage and cleaned up the blades, scraped the rust of both inside faces and then doing the bare minimum sharpen of the blades which had never been sharpened since they were made. Fortunately the inlays on both blades were sound, no forging faults, hairline fracturing, had never been bashed around by a butcher and were not brittle with the effect of microchipping. Put the back together after cleaning and greasing the hinge and they are competitively good to the pair of Wiss #7 that I have been using on my cutting table for some years and they are not yet finished.

Interestingly enough I own a very good pair of Heinisch #7 shears but they came from Florida where the much damper climate had much deeper rust and while they perform OK and have plenty of grunt, this new pair will be a better pair and they may make it to my cutting table if they shape up OK.

[hutch--]

This is the above pair with the blades and hinge repaired. The handles are on their way to being ready to paint, just a bit more work in that area.

[Henry Hall]

It's like a different pair of shears! What do you use to remove the surface oxidisation?

[hutch--]

A pedestal linisher with a range of different grit belts. you need to be a good shot so you don't get ripples, finish it fine enough then buff the surfaces with metal polishing mops and abrasive compound. The blade inner faces were good enough to lap by hand with a curved block and fine emery cloth and did not need to be hollow ground. I had to shim the head end of the hinge but the shims only take about 5 minutes to make so it was no big deal and the hinge can be taken apart with no melodrama once it was cleaned up and shimmed.

[hutch--]

This is the final metamorphosis, the prep for the paint on the handles was done by hand then painted by hand with an art paint brush as the shape and required technique was too complex for other methods. The paint is actually an industrial protective coating that by design needs to put on as a very heavy coat that produces a few runs here and there but as the old paint also had a few runs in it, it no big deal. It is a 2 pack polyurethane that takes about a day to touch dry, a week to safely handle it and after a month it turns as hard as glass.

[Schneiderfrei]

Do you use a two pack paint for the handles?

[Henry Hall]

The transformation is almost unreal. They look new!