southsamurai

Amen to that. Keeping a sense of open communication is vital while kids are going to be experimenting and exploring. Not just their bodies amd sexuality, but definitely for those.

Nah, that prompts community is pretty relaxed about that, and the story drop one is even more loose.

I totally get it. The problem is that there's multiple goals with knife maintenance amd preservation, so you end up with conflicting information that looks like it can work for every situation, but doesn't really.

Me, if I'm taking an old slipjoint like that from rusty but intact, I'll use whatever rag is handy. Old t-shirt material, flannel, denim, whatever. Shop towels work great too, those cheap and rough ones in particular.

Since the goal with your specific situation was to get rust gone, the solvent is what matters, not what you use to do the rubbing. If you're dealing with something that's got fragile handle materials, you want to watch what you use. And, you do want something that isn't linty because those little fibers can get into moving parts, but for just oiling and derusting, anything works since you'll follow up with a thorough oiling anyway.

See, there are knives where you essentially have nothing useful but blades, or where blades need replacing or reshaping, and that does change what you can do, and what you should do. Some knives have high monetary or historical value, so you have to approach them with that in mind. So you run into knife geeks that only approach a given knife through the most conservative lens possible, but also ones that are purely utilitarian because that's the kind of knives they deal with most.

My take is that even a crappy knife that you plan to use should be treated with minimum removal of material. The life span of a knife is in the steel. The more you sand or grind away, the less life is left, no matter what kind of preservation would be involved.

That can look different based on conditions and resources, but that way of thinking helps a lot. Now, you aren't going to fuck up a knife blade that's at least relatively intact by hitting it with metal polish and some shop towels. Or by light scrubbing with other abrasives that are fine grained, or otherwise can't dig into the steel itself.

It also helps to Indiana's understand that there's more than one kind of job possible. You can clean a knife, which is just getting rid of dirt, grime, and any surface discoloration; followed by oiling and sharpening.

You can repair a knife, which would be fixing broken parts, possibly regrinding things as needed, but generally taking a knife that isn't usable and making it usable. This isn't something you do with antiques or historical items, but a knife for use is no problem.

You've got restoration, which is not making it like new, that's refurbishing. Restoration is a form of preservation where you stabilize existing parts, and make sure they last while also hopefully making it usable if it wasn't. The goal though is mainly to make the knife suitable for display and collection, so you do the bare minimum intervention. This is what you do for collections and displays.

Refurbishing though, that's when you're taking a knife as close to new as possible without entirely replacing everything. You'd possibly sand or otherwise resurface the blade. You'd replace or repair parts as possible and needed. But you aren't trying to preserve anything other than usability, negate because once you're done, any monetary or historical value is gone, and all you have is a useful tool again.

Your knife, there's no historic value there, or monetary, because they're fairly common and easy to find still. So unless you're super into collecting for the far future, all you have to worry about is keeping it in working order. So you don't have to worry as much. It's a matter of just not making things worse as much as trying to make things better.

You run into old farts like me, we tend to do the bare minimum. Why spend a week futzing around with tasks that don't bring anything to the knife? Why grind when you can scrub? Why scrub when you can just soak and wipe down? The less you have to do, the less you change what doesn't need changing. You could spend hours carefully grinding and sanding to get flat sides and shiny steel, but for what? It's still an old knife that looks old, so why not let it look uniquely old? The more you change a given knife, the less of its history is there anyway, and you might as well just buy a new one.

Which is all long winded, I know, but it's important to understand the why more than techniques. There's dozens of ways to achieve a goal, but figuring out that goal in the first place takes a bit of theory instead of application.

Reading on a phone is like fucking on a balance beam. Yeah, you can do it, but you end up straining a lot and not having much fun.

I read on tablets, be they eink dedicated devices or just regular android tablets.

Please, please, please, anyone coming across this comment, if you have an old knife ping me and wait before you do anything other than lightly oil and wipe it down

There's a lot of work that goes into preserving knives. This does not preclude using them! But there's an assumption that making old knives shiny and new-ish looking is a benefit to the knife. It isn't. If that's something anyone wants to do, I have zero issues with that because it isn't my knife.

I would hope that before anyone jumps at it, they'd check and see if they've got something rare or unusual just because some things have value beyond what they can do, or even how much they'd sell for. But that's not going to happen often, luckily.

So, OP, you have jumped in, so let's deal with what up do next.

What you have now is exposed metal. It's still got some of the patina to it, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get to a reasonable degree of stability.

See, steel oxidizes. Well, you can get steel that won't without major chemical fuckery, but even those super rust resistant steels can oxidize in the right circumstances.

When you look at a knife (or and steel or iron item tbh), not all oxides are equal. Generally, you'll have two types: stable and unstable. Unstable oxides tend to be reddish, orange, or yellow, depending on the exact composition of the metal and what environment it's exposed to. Those oxides are going to keep "eating" the steel, and they'll do it fairly rapidly if no steps are taken.

However, when you see black, gray, bluish, or even some greenish coloring with or without added texture, the oxidation is going to be slow, or in the right circumstances even non progressive. That's the kind of oxides called patina. I suck at remembering the chemistry involved, but it comes down to how the atoms interact. Point being that a patina is one kind of reaction, and having it present prevents other kinds.

So knife geeks always get upset when someone gets rid of a patina rather than treating it to improve the function of the knife. But if you aren't already a knife geek, you wouldn't know anything about it.

Here's the key to making a "high carbon" steel last. You want a clean and smooth surface first. Then you want to control how oxides form. It really isn't difficult with a new knife. You just keep it clean and oiled, don't store it in leather or fabric sheathes/cases, and use it or store it in a fairly low humidity environment with a decent coating of oil. There's fancy shit you can use for long term storage, and other fancy stuff for display, but that's tangential.

Now, you've pulled off a decent amount of patina, but you got lucky; you used mostly brass and seem to have been really light handed with the sandpaper. There's not a lot of surface scratching, and that's good because scratches are where moisture loves to gather and make rust happen.

What you want to do next is get a magnifying glass and check to see how severe any scratches that can't be seen in the picture are. If they're even and not super deep, you're good to go. If they're uneven or very deep, you'll need to even them out with some very fine steel wool or something like a 1k grit automotive sandpaper.

I'm not seeing anything in the picture that's a major issue, but it is an image that's been sent over the internet, so it might not show the scratch pattern on this end, no matter how much effort you put into a pic.

But, once you have a smooth and even surface, if you're going to use it, all you need is some mineral oil, or maybe some 3-in-1, or your favorite gun oil (I'm a ballistol or rem-oil preferrer, but almost anything will do). Just a little dab on a rag and rub it on until there's a slight shine from the oil. Not enough to run, too much is as bad as not enough in its own way

Then you sharpen and use for decades. The patina will come back over time, and you'll never need to do anything other than oil it and keep the joint free of debris.

If you're going to throw it in a drawer, holla back at me, and I'll run though my preferred options if you want.

Seriously, there's nothing damaged in that picture. There's signs of wear, use, and time, but that isn't damage, that's just a used item. Most of that, like the steel itself, you'd do harm trying to make it all shiny and new looking. Even the bolsters wouldn't really benefit from polishing tbh, and wouldn't look right if you did.

That dimpling, btw, has a big benefit. Makes the sides of the knife have little pockets when it's cutting through something wet. It won't stick as much as perfectly flat sides.

For the future, when removing rust, start with solvents and cloth, maybe an old toothbrush. Elbow grease ain't gonna damage metal at all. Brass brushes are for when that fails. But, if it isn't yellow, orange, or red, and it doesn't come off with a nylon brush and some wd40, it probably shouldn't come off at all unless you plan to force a patina (which is doable, but has issues and problems that come with it too).

Legit man, I've been a knife geek since I was a kid, and I fucked up a few knives before I found out what does and doesn't benefit a knife long term. There are times when stripping down to raw metal is called for, but you have to be willing to do what it takes to keep it in good shape after that

Edit: side note: that's an old imperial. Decent knives, not likely high dollar collectibles, but they're a fairly popular brand among collectors

It's a little weird for sure. But the whole "do not shove things into you that aren't fingers or designed for it" conversation is a lot less disturbing than the potential disturbance of that hospital visit. For that matter, it applies to the "don't shove yourself or rub yourself against anything not designed for it or on/in a consenting and legal human" as well.

I've known a few people that suffered injury from humping stuff that wasn't wise.

Ignoring context, it would be unusual, but not inherently worrying. There's plenty of mothers that help guide their daughters to an age appropriate sex toy, and some that will do the same for their sons. Rarer, there are fathers that will do so, but men have to worry more about external opinions about such. A mothers buys a dildo for their kid, the default assumption is that it's weird, but not bad. A father does it, and the default assumption is that he's over the line.

That being said parents should be the default source is advice about such things, because a bunch of young idiots (as opposed to old idiots) trying to advise each other about things they don't have much experience with is a recipe for hospital visits.

In terms of general purpose guidance, and funding/ordering sex toys, there's nothing wrong with a parent helping their kids in that way, assuming care is taken. There's even an argument to be made that verbal instructions on safe use are even to be encouraged, and helpful hints aren't exactly out of line (for real, a lot of young people masturbate in unhealthy ways that just a few sentences could prevent much trouble down the line).

In context, with the info you provided in comments, the mother in question is not being a good parent in this case, so it fits the word abnormal in the sense that it is unhealthy.

There's !storydrop@lemmy.world

And !writingprompts@literature.cafe

For your basic writing needs

I used to! At least during really long sessions.

You do your thing for a while, swap out positions and have a few drags while being ridden. Swap back out, and she takes a few drags. Then you go back at it full steam. Repeat every half hour or so, as needed.

Just be warned, the longer you're a smoker, the more difficult that gets.

Eh, any time someone ascribes motivations to animals, my butthole spasms.

The best that should be said is that the behaviors they exhibit are similar to the behaviors they exhibit for kittens or sometimes sick cats.

Somehow, somebody decided that meant they think we're bad hunters, and the idea took off because it's funny, but you can't know what goes on inside the thoughts of other humans reliably, much less other animals.

There's competing possibilities that the cats are showing off their kills to their social group, which is not only a common behavior when cats are young, but when they're mated, but you don't see people crowing about them bringing us food to get in our pants.

Overall, cats seem to treat us like other cats. Not exactly the same, but with less distinction than other domesticated animals. Horses, as an example, have a much wider distinction, for equally unprovable reasons.

My personal pet idea is that any sufficiently social animal, including humans, is instinctively going to seek out groups. They/we will negotiate the lack of a unifying language as best as possible, but with plenty of misunderstandings. It isn't so much that other animals see us as being the same as them. It's that they don't really have the need for the distinction; there's the in group (pride, pack, clan, whatever you want to call it) and out groups. When dealing with the family group, any animal will perform the same basic behaviors that their instincts tell them to.

Domestication just means that a given type of animal has developed or been bred to have, a stronger instinct for social bonding than wild animals, to the degree that they'll accept other species as family easier.

Ignoring all the politicians...

Anthony Anderson, the actor. But it's not as an actor he annoys me. I'm actually a bit of a fan of him on the job. Sometimes gets a little hammy, but not too bad. Great at comedy.

But he always has a stick up his ass in interviews. I'm not sure why, since he seems like an otherwise decent guy, but damn. Like, relax man, just ease up.

I don't really shop by brand any more.

I developed a caffeine sensitivity back maybe fifteen years ago, so it's decaf or nothing, and only small amounts of decaf at that.

So, since I go through maybe a pound or so in six months, I shop by region and try to find the best beans I can based on what I'm looking for.

Blue mountain is pretty much the best out there for my tastes, though getting it in decaf is sometimes a difficult thing.

There's a ton of great coffee coming out of Ethiopia, and I've yet to find a brand that wasn't palatable. Some of it is amazing, but again you have to hunt down decaf.

Kona is a good happy medium, and easy to find decaf in most brands, sometimes even at a grocery store (though it's rarely great coffee).