Kitaeji Maintenance 2

What I did is polish part of my Kitaeji 180mm Petite with some polish.
These polish make mirror finish to very soft iron so in most cases the Kitaeji patterns are gone.

After the polish I used one or 2 of the finger stones and brought the Kitaeji pattern back.

Case 1 Mothers Mag & Aluminum Polish

You can see after the Mothers polish the Kitaeji pattern is gone.

Now I want to have the Kitaeji pattern back.
I used Uchigomori fingerstone with some water.

The mud or swarf is a bit thin for this Uchigomori finger stone. Swarf/mud ratio is high and indicate that this stone is a real "Sword Polish Grade" Uchigomori. In 1 or 2 min the Kitaeji pattern is back. But the contrast of the pattern is not so high.

Next I tried Hakka fingerstone:

The Hakka fingerstone makes much more mud.  After 1 minute or so I got much more contrast. With more contrast you get also the wide or broad lines.

Case 2 BKF:

I polished with BKF only 1 min or 2 min. The time maybe to short for the acid of BKF to react full with the steel. But still you can see that the Kitaeji got a bit brighter.

I used a Maruka fingerstone with water to eliminate the bright side caused with BKF.

 

I used the fingerstone for 1 to 2min. 

This Maruka fingerstone is the best of all 3 fingerstones in this test. It has high swarf/mud ratio and is very fast.

 The contrast of the Kitaeji pattern is in the middle of Hakka and Uchigomori.

More tests in part 3