A little polish in the time of COVID

[Interested Party]

Originally Posted by JBG163

Could be vice jaws marks (seems regular ...)... Actually, it would be nice to etch it with ferrochloric acid, it seems to have a nice blade structure.

Vice jaws, that's a good hypothesis. Those regular marks were the subject of the thread linked above. They also coincided with minute traces of gold visible under magnification before cleaning and to the places that encrustation, to use Miller's terminology, would have traditionally occurred. I left the bigger, visible, traces on the tang.

What I was specifically asking the group about in this thread is the structure. Is it created by a flaw in my cleaning process, a naturally occurring dendritic formation, a wild mechanical damascus, or even a sham pattern?

I have read that ferric chloride is messy and its hard to control corrosion on the freshly etched surface during cleaning. JBG have you had any problems with it?