[John Schaefer]

So I recently purchased a museum glamdring for relatively cheap but want to refinish it. I'm not a big fan of fake distressing and silver plating.Its supposedly solid steel so I would like to polish it to a satin finish if possible. I did the same thing to the sword of Ibelin I bought also cheap. I used only 1500 grit paper to remove the silver finish on that and polished with 2000 and 2500 grit paper, also 000 steel wool. It came out in a copperish hue if that makes sense and am not all that happy with it. I read the polish thread, but the piece was once satin and didn't know if that would work for me. Also maybe considering doing the blade as well especially to get rid of the authenticity marks. Only cost 300 so I'm not too worried about destroying value or anything. All advice would be welcomed. Thanks

John

[Aleksei Sosnovski]

Usually metals can't be plated with other metals very well. The only common metal that "sticks" to almost everything else is copper. So metals are usually first plated with copper and then the copper layer is plated with something else (chrome, nickel, etc). So for your "copperish hue"... Either you have to sand it more or the piece is simply made of copper alloy. The latter is quite possible for pommels and crossguards, though I would rather expect them to be made of a aluminium or magnesium alloy if they are really cheap.

First thing to do is to take a file an try the pieces that you want to remove coating from. This way you will be able to see what metal they are made of. If you see that the metal is OK and you want to proceed than

1) Take some ROUGH sand paper. 160 grit should be OK.
2) Sand... And sand... And sand...
3) Sand some more until you have removed all the plating
4) Now take sandpaper with roughly 2 times higher grit (280 to 400 grit would be OK) and again sand, sand, sand...
5) Repeat step 4 as many times as you want each time taking sand paper with roughly 2 times higher grit. For satin finish you can stop at 400..1000 grit. 2000 grit gives mirror finish.

[Daniel Wallace]

you kinda have that problem with the low end 'wall hanger' types of sword even the so called 'battle ready' swords.

i was given a sword by one of my aunts a few years back as a x mass present and i decided on redoing it as well. the upper guard and pummel were crome and after i dug into them i found a nice little bit of aluminum - nasty cheap easy to cast pains-taking to grind or file aluminum.

now if you find aluminum under your copper, it will at least look a little like steel. you could polish it up or leave it as a mat finish. to the untrained eye it will look just like steel.

if you don't find anything under the copper - you could consider bluing it if you don't the look of it like it. the paint on bluing agents on the market lately would blacken the metal and still give it a little bit or a period look.