I stripped my camo regulator which had roughly the same surface finish as the camo 511 (got mine last evening-you are correct FF grind!!). There are a lot of tool marks and it is far from satin finished, but cleaned up, it is kind of shiny. I was going to polish and cold blue it, but the more I look at it, the more that I like the rugged look of the raw steel. Bottom line, the finish covers a lot of imperfections and it could be rougher than you expect. It would, however, still be an extremely fine knife.