Restoration of Antique Two Handed Cleaver

In this video I'm restoring a very big cleaver. These cleavers are also called „splitter“. They were used by butchers before they had electric saws to help their work. There are a few characteristics that make it very obvious that this is a cleaver: the very thick blade and the big angle on the cutting edge, the hole in the front to hang it on the wall, the very long handle to hold it with two hands.
I've found this cleaver actually a long time ago and I was very impressed by its size. Now I thought it's the time to restore it. This project was pretty straight forward. After a quick disassembly I gave the blade a nice sandblasting with glass beads to remove all the rust. With the help of a hand held belt sander I removed all the pitting of the blade. On the tang I just sanded it clean and didn't went that far as it will be covered by the handle afterwards. I didn't want to remove anymore material to remove all the pitting, that would just weaken the tang. Once I hade it all clean I switched to hand sanding with finer grits, all the way up to 600 wet. I decided to go with a satin finish on the blade. There it is very important that all sanding marks point in the same direction to get a uniform look.
For the handle I choose pear wood. I really like the color of it, it's also quite hard and nice to work with. I first drilled all counterbored holes before I started to rough shape it with a saw and rasps.
To fix the handle on the tang I used screw-able rivets, also know as „Chicago rivets“. I machines these out of brass to get a nice contrast with the pear later. I applied Loctite on the threads of the rivets to make sure they will never ever come loose again. After tightening them against each other I filed their heads flush with the handle, leaving just a round dot of brass in the wood. Then it was just time to fine sand the complete handle up to 600 grit and oil it with linseed oil. Before applying the oil I sprayed some water onto the wood to raise the grain, which I then sanded down again with 600 grit to achieve the smoothest possible finish. Now there was just the sharpening of the blade missing. I did that on my friends belt sander with a 400 grit belt running against the cutting edge. It ended up being super sharp so it even cuts tomatoes very nice and clean.

Even though this was a rather simple project compared to my other ones, I really enjoyed restoring it. I'm very happy how this cleaver has turned out in the end. I'm glad I went with the satin finish, it really has a very classy look together with the pear handles and the brass rivets.

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