This one took 3-4 days to restore but wow, what a restoration!

Now, conventional wisdom on the YouTubes says to use a metal countersink to sharpen a hole punch, but that puts a 45 on the tubing wall. I have a tapered half-round diamond needle file and a desire to make something deadly out of something antique that was destined for the trash.

What I mean by that, is this …

A hole punch is a sharpened tube. If you sharpen the interior bevel to 45 it cuts one way but if you increase the bevel angle to something more acute at the tip of the cylinder, it will be sharper.

And this thing was surely trashed not by abuse but by time. You see, when I got to restoring this thing, it was packed with paper, which wasn’t so much of a problem, but it was also used to cut leather and someone did not clear the tube of the previously cut leather (probably because it was jammed with paper). So over time, the tip (where I found the leather) had rusted so badly that it was pitted to the point of making the tip of the cutter ragged from pitting.

I was going to have to sharpen away quite a bit of material to get a clean tip at a steep angle for a sublime cutter.

As a reminder, here is the before:

This was my weapon (aside from Evaporust; which did what it does best):

I put the diamond needle file into the pin vise to make it easier to hold and much harder to drop.

It took a while, but I was able to put a wicked sharp edge on this thing. It cut through this leather like it wasn’t even there. It left me wondering why anyone would ever use a lever based hole punch when they can use a screw driven one. This is lovely!

I learned you can get them in 2- and 3-hole sets as well. I am happy with this singleton for right now. It really works quite well.

The Evaporust made it possible to read the writing on the top of the screw post

I was also able to clean up some writing on the bottom …

“Catalog No” (left blank to the right of that for a label) followed by “Duvinage Corporation” and “Hagerstown — M.D. U.S.A.” as well as an “A3” whatever that means.

I was surprised at how sharp I got it by the fact that it seems like it wants to take a piece out of my finger just by testing how sharp it is.