Hey everyone. I have several quality pieces I'm maintaining and despite keeping things regularly oiled and wiping down after handling, one of my blades has a tiny spot of what looks like early rust on it that oil and wiping is not removing.

Now in all this time I've never actually had to break out the metal glo polisher or the 0000 steel wool that I've had sitting the locker for the last few years after reading the excellent article by Patrick Kelly ( http://www.myArmoury.com/feature_care.html ) and I'm a bit leery about doing it for the first time on one of my expensive blades. It seems he likes to put some polishing compound and use the super fine steel wool instead of a cloth to rub it in...

Anyone have any advice on a cheap (like sub-100$) high carbon steel blade that I can practice on? I'm sure its really easy but before I do it myself and end up seriously scratching the blade, bearing down too hard, trying new techniques etc I'd rather try it out on something I don't care quite as much about...

Any personal advice/experience on what works/what doesn't for an ideally non-abrasive technique would be appreciated too.

I may have to try some of that Ren Wax in the future....

What kind of sword is it?

If it's an Albion, no need to practice. Get some grey scotch bright and follow the instructions on their site. Grey scotch brite is what they use on the finish, and as long as you go in the same direction as the existing scratches, it will be invisible on the surface. And if you screw up (which you will), you can easily erase it by going over it again correctly.

To me, this is an incredibly convenient feature of Albion swords. Things happen to swords all the time even if they are just sitting on a wall (and mine don't), and if I could not match the finish perfectly all of mine would have blemishes, rust, scratches, etc.

The worst thing you can do with scotch brite is to polish against the grain (so to speak), which will create ugly scratch marks on the finish. But again, these can be erased with the same scortch brite by polishing in the right direction.