Good day,
Your knife still looks to be in quite decent condition, so you will have a couple of choices as to how good of a condition you wish to ultimately make it. Additionally, the materials are not that costly but it will take a small commitment in time.
In regards to how much of a restoration you wish to do, I will give you my observations and suggestion- If you look at the edge of your knife, you can see how the edge has turned over a little bit? This tells us the knife is of a softer and not harder metal. I do not see this as a bad thing, as it does make a knife much easier to sharpen, especially out in the field when it is being used. But it also makes it scratch much easier. So if you give this knife a fine polish it will not stay fine for long!
What I would do is simply clean the blade and leave the larger scratches. I will describe how to do that, and and when you have done that if you wish to try polishing your knife I can then tell you how to go about that.
At any rate, for your knife what you need to begin with is called "steel wool" here in the states. It looks like this:
As you can see, it comes in a few different grades. They are either marked "coarse, medium, fine" or they will have a numbering system such as this cut and paste:
# "0000" = Super Fine
# "000" = Extra Fine
# "00" = Very Fine
# "0" = Fine
# "1" = Medium
# "2" = Medium Course
# "3" = Course
Get the superfine grade and a fine or medium. Use the medium to remove all of your rust spots, then the superfine grade with some light machine oil and just keep rubbing it until you are happy with the polish.
Here are a couple of suggestions- Before you start, tape the handle of your knife to prevent it from getting scratches. Use masking tape or electrical tape as they do not leave a residue and both remove easily.
Only rub the blade lengthwise, if you rub at any other angle it will be noticeable and sometimes you have a hell of a time getting those scratches out!
Start rubbing with the coarsest steel wool you have, and use that to remove ALL of the rust. The finer grades are ONLY to polish the blade AFTER you have removed ALL the blemishes.
Do not neglect the sheath. If the sheath is neglected the oils in it eventually dry out and the leather cracks. When this happens even though you can oil the leather the cracks will remain and they cannot get smaller, only bigger. Most any sort of shoe oil/leather preservative will work and my suggestion is to take the sheath to a leather shop, explain that it is for your first knife that you wish to keep in good condition so you can gift it to one of your children at some point in the future, and see about getting a small amount of something from them.
NOW- if it is difficult for you to do that, here is a crazy thing that I have done in the past and it can work quite well too- If you use shaving cream in an aerosol can, look at the ingredients and see if "lanolin" is one of the main ones. If it is, you can coat your sheath with shaving cream and wrap it in plastic or wax paper overnight, then polish with a cloth or paper towel. It will not only clean the leather but preserve it. It sounds crazy but it works! When my son was playing baseball, I read this as a method to "break in" baseball gloves and it worked quite well. I have since used it on occasion to clean old and dirty knife sheaths where I first rub it into the sheath then wipe with a paper towel to get the dirt off, then another coat and let sit over night in plastic. The only downside is there is a perfume/fragrance in the shave cream so they smell like they are going out to the movies for a while.
Anyway, hope that helps. If after you have polished it with steel wool you wish to make look better, post up some new pictures and we can move forward from there.
Regards,
Mark
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