All right, so I forgot to take some pictures of the cleanup work on the Carlisle hinges, but there wasn't a whole lot to see. As previously mentioned, I used a grinding stone on my dremel to smooth out the rough edges as best as I could, and "finished" the rest with needle files. I think there's still room for improvement, but until I have a realistic method of buffing these I'm not going to worry about it. As previously noted, these hinges are only 5 cm wide, while historical accuracy would require something in the range of 6-7.5 cm. I'm just saving material since this is still the prototype.
Cutting out the triangles turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated, possibly because I was using too soft of a backstop (wood) for most of it. (I was using a chisel...) Anyways, as a result the hinge plates bent back and forth quite a bit and had to be hammered flat repeatedly. This means the edges of the cuts aren't very clean - the metal around the edges is a bit wrinkled from the stretching and compressing. On the bright side, my hinge plates are probably pretty close to full hardness after all the hammering.
Some of the more observant might notice the stamped rings around the rivet holes -- Historically, this seemed to be a common "decorative" feature of hinge and buckle plates. However, the circles you see here are not decorative, but accidental! They are a byproduct of the whitney punch being maladjusted. This made me wonder whether the "decorative" rings on historical finds might also just be a side effect of the punch used to make the holes - but I haven't looked into it.
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