The number one mistake made by people trying to sharpen their own knives.

Hi everyone, I'm Paul from Alexandria Night Sharpening, so last week I did a survey and asked you where you are in your

sharpen

ing journey and we got some interesting results, so most

people

came to my YouTube channel because they wanted to start a

sharpen

ing business. and that was the highest percentage and the next highest percentage was

people

who just wanted to learn how to sharpen, either for themselves or just because they wanted to learn how to sharpen things, the third percentage were people who two years or less after starting a sharpening business so thank you to those of you who answered that and I'm going to try to adapt some of the videos that I'm going to make to get closer to those in particular. audiences, but the one thing that I thought was most important is that we do something about how to sharpen just the basics of how to sharpen and why this is important, because no matter what you're sharpening on, I don't care if you're using a wet stone on a flat surface I don't care if you're using a 1x3 like the one I have here in front of me I don't care if you're using a torac with a round wheel the basics of sharpening are the same so let's talk about the biggest

mistake

s I see that what people

trying

to learn to sharpen or new sharpeners make and why they don't get the results they want.

The

number

one

mistake

people

trying

to sharpen make. something is that they don't lift a bur, so what is a bur if you take the edge of something sharp, the very, very, you know, edge of the peak we're talking about, if we're talking about a mountain peak, you know if ? This is the edge of our knife, that point is called the apex, the angle that leads to the apex in the simplest of terms is the bevel, so the problem I see the most is that people don't lift the bur on one side of the knife. and then they'll start sharpening it on the other side and wonder why the knife never gets sharpened, so the proper method to sharpen almost everything now there are some exceptions, but we're not going to talk about that now. now we are talking about a normal standard knife, whether it is a kitchen knife or any type of EDC knife, it does not matter if it is sharpened on both sides, the process to sharpen that blade is to start sharpening, which is the removal of metal on one . side and you stay on that side until you have lifted a burr, so what is a burr?

A burr is a little sharp hook that is created from the grinding of that metal that starts to form on the top of the Apex, so the top of that knife will start to form this little hook and if you rub your fingers over the top of that knife you will feel that bur. Now we could go deeper into discussions about burrs and types of burrs, but we won't go there. because we're still, this is just the basics of sharpening, okay, there are different types of burs, there are wire edge burs and there are what we call feather burs or aluminum burs, don't worry about any of that, in this point we're just going to follow the basics of how to sharpen something, mainly a knife, so you work with RNG on one side until you rub your fingers across or up over that knife and it doesn't matter if you're doing it on a flat surface. stone, whether you're doing it with a belt sharpener, whether you're working on a tormac with a round wheel, you're going to work on just one side of that knife until you feel that burr and it's pretty distinctive and you shouldn't have problems feeling it, this is where it can be a little tricky and why some people can't feel the Burr, so what I have set up here is a 120 grit belt.

This is a pretty aggressive belt, the ability to feel that Burr It depends to some extent. The grit level you're working on and one of the reasons people have a hard time feeling the burrs is that they're probably trying to sharpen something with too high a grit at first, so if I were using a mil belt grains instead of a 120 grit belt and tried to sharpen this knife. I could sit here on this side for a while and not feel a strawberry. Also, the finer the grain, the finer the burr that is created, so you know it's a thousand-grit burr. it's much harder to feel than a 120 grit bur or an 80 grit bur or a 50 grit bur, you can't miss it trust me, if you pull a 50 grit bur the lowest belt I have I think which is a 36 grit belt that will make a burr like this. deep, no one could help but feel that bur once created, so that's the other problem I see is that they simply haven't ground or sharpened enough on that side to create a burr, so why does this often happen?

A lot of people didn't start with something crude enough to create that bur and they think, wow, I've been grinding on this side for a long time, maybe I should go to the other side and what happens, well, what happens is I never in actually Apex the knife so what happens is the correct way to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, just on one side where Burr is created, sorry, then we go to the other side and what we do, then we do exactly the same thing. What we grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind until we feel a burr again.

Now you have Apex the knife and what does that mean? That means you've removed enough metal from one side and enough metal from the other side that you've actually created a point where you've both met and what happens is if you don't do it that way, if you grind, grind, grind. , grind, grind and you say oh, I think I did enough and then you grind, grind, grind, grind, grind and you say, oh. I think I did enough, what you did is you never

made

the point clear, you never

made

the sharpest edge of the knife, which is the Apex they have never known, so here is the other rule I was taught early on in sharpening and it is good to maintain it.

Also note, never go up the grit, so I'm going to start with this 120 grit belt. I'm going to polish one side down to a burr. When I create that burr, I'll turn to the other side and polish again. until you've created a bur on that side, now that knife should cut with that grain. I don't care if it's 50 80 120, even with 120 grit it should cut, never go to the next highest belt or the next highest stone or whatever you want. Whatever you're using, no matter what you're using, don't increase the grit progression until you're cutting where you start, if it's not cutting at 120, going to 400 won't do any good.

You're not going to cut because you haven't positioned the knife right, so it's that simple: start at a belt, take a bur, go to the other side, create a burr and then you can check it with a simple paper test, it should be. cutting, so I'm going to show you that right now, so I have a part of the Uline catalog just to show you that this knife is completely dull, it doesn't cut, it's doing a little bit of Nix in there, but you can see it doesn't cut. Well, okay, so we'll leave that aside, so I'll start with this and start working on one side until I get a burr with a 120 grip belt, it usually doesn't take long.

It is a very aggressive belt and as I said before, keep in mind that if you start with a much higher grit it will take longer and I think that is why many people stop sharpening it; They may have bought a 400 grit belt or 500 grit or 600 grit wet stone and they try to sharpen

their

knife and they never get it done because they never lift the initial burr so this will raise the burr pretty quickly and we'll see how many passes it takes , but Just keep in mind that it was three passes and there is still no burr, so I'm starting to feel a burr here at the tip and a little bit here in the middle, but you also feel spots where there are no burrs yet if you feel areas where there are there's no burr yet, you can continue sharpening, you want it all over the blade, so now I feel a burr completely from the opposite side of where I was sharpening, so when I reach my hand over here I feel that nice rough little hook that is.

Grabbing now I'll switch to the other side, do the same thing and now I have a burr on both sides, okay, and when you feel it, you'll feel that it even feels sharp now that it hasn't been refined, we'll talk about that. we'll refine that burr later, but you'll see that this knife should now cut, it's not going to be a nice sharp cut, but it should cut through that paper and you shouldn't see any problem cutting with 120 grit, that's because we properly raised a burr on both sides, so Now I can go up in my progression and I'm just going to take, I'm going to steal this 600 grid from this one next to us, I usually go from one machine to the next, so I'm not changing things. but since the camera is installed here, I'm just going to put a 600 grid here so you can see it does the same thing.

I'm going to start with two or three passes and then feel that burr. Again, the Burr will be a little harder to feel each time we progress. Now that we have Apex, the knife, it's not so important that you feel that Burr, but the important thing is that you keep your

number

of strokes the same on both sides let's do our quick test with paper again here and I'll show you that it cuts even better, it even almost starts to push cut and we haven't even gotten to the final part of when you sharpen a knife, which is hone or stop and we can talk about the differences there, but now I'm going to take a 1200 grit strop and this will probably only take about two passes on each side, okay, and we'll just check it, it should still be cutting and If it's still cutting very well, no problem.

Well, those are the basics of sharpening, so the next step in sharpening a knife is sharpening or stopping. These terms are often mixed up and misused, and even companies sometimes do it. The difference between the two, so technically honing is usually done with metal, but also when you start using very high abrasives, you get to a point where you're in the honing category and you'll see things where they are, like I said. where the terms are used in a way where something could be called a home but is technically a belt where I have seen this is with wheels tormac tormac has a round leather wheel which I have often heard referred to as a honing wheel technically stops are from leather and generally or but they can also be synthetic and generally the files are metal in grits that are quite high because your goal at this point is not sharpening, which is the removal of metal, your goal is to refine the bur.

So if you've seen a set of metal

knives

, you may have a metal polisher that doesn't remove metal, the polisher is just fixing, aligning and straightening the bur. Sometimes it rips out the strawberry, which you know happens. There are so many things we could talk about about burrs, we could talk about them all day, but basically all you need to know about sharpening and braking is that it is the final process of sharpening a knife and it is also the process that is used to keep

knives

longer between sharpening, so as I mentioned before, stopping can be done with a leather strap since we're settled here.

I'm going to show you this tool. My favorite method of stopping is with a round leather wheel on a variable speed grinder, but I'm going to show you this method since we're doing everything with this one tool, so the important thing about stopping if you're doing it with a belt leather was sharpening and we didn't talk about this. AAL I was sharpening what was called Edge Leading, which meant my sharpening belts went up to the edge of my knife and down, it's always Edge Trailing, which means it will go across and away from the sharp edge of the blade.

The reason for this is that if you try to do it on the blade, all you're going to do is cut your leather belt in half, it's always done, Ed continues, whether it's a round leather wheel, whether it's a piece leather like this or whether you're pulling it through a leather strap that's just attached to a board, you never go into the leather, you're always pulling it through it, and you know it, even when you see the old barbers with razors crossing from behind. towards the front of the blade, so since I was going along the edge to sharpen, now I have to change the settings on this sharpener so that the belt goes in the other direction because we have to go along the edge to stop this knife, now it is moving away For me, stopping is just going through this abrasive and what it's going to do is refine and fix that little bur at the end of this knife and if you look really close, a lot of times you can even see the bur come off. and it doesn't take much but some depends on the amount of polishing that was done, the sharpening method that was done, sometimes it is easier to refine a bur and sometimes it may be more difficult to refine that bur and we can get into that in more detail later, but let's see how it goes now and you'll see that it's now a push cut.

I'm not even cutting, this is now a push cut because we've refined that very fine apex beautifully with this leather strap and you can see that's how it was. It doesn't take much now to know how to stop. The nice thing about doing it at a guided angle is that you can get the angle right. You can stop something too much. If you dotoo much, you'll actually start to dull the knife, so you don't want to waste a lot of time stopping, but depending on the method you're using, I'll only show this to torac users, sometimes it takes a little longer than when you use something like this . on and also depending on the speed of what you're using, so when I use my variable speed round leather strap it's like two quick passes through that leather wheel and this thing usually stops perfectly with a leather strap like this, depending on the speed it's going, it may be similar to what you saw, it was two hits on a torac wheel that only goes 90 RPM, so it goes much slower, is this the slowest speed here, here, this is 400 uh the tormac wheel actually goes even slower so you might have to spend more time stopping depending on how fast you're braking right? and those are the basics of sharpening, so if you follow that you should be able to sharpen almost anything now, just one other thing I'm going to touch on here when we're done, I'm going to talk about the two different ways to sharpen.

Leading Edge Leading Edge I prefer leading edge sharpening, which is where you saw when I started putting the abrasive on the belt. The reason I like it is when, especially on the 1x3 and 2 42 belt sharpeners, it's faster, it just creates a burr. Qui faster and I also like it because I feel like I have a lot more control over my knife since I push it towards me if you go. Edge crawls where he's going. I always find that I have to fight the knife that is thrown at him. machine many sharpeners like Edge trailing now, why well, the only thing with Edge trailing is that you will see that the burr is created very easily.

You'll see a shiny section of metal that literally starts to appear on the top of the knife, which is usually like a floret or what some people call a feathery burr and a lot of guys like that because they know okay, yeah, now I have a Strawberry, you don't have to feel it, you can literally see it, the only reason I don't have it. Like that one, it takes a lot more time and second, the burr removal process I find is a lot harder when you sharpen the trailing edge now, it's a lot harder, no, you can still remove that burr, but I find that the leading edge becomes sharpens faster.

Removing strawberries seems easier to me. Sharpen the edge. I save it mainly for fillet knives that have the curve and any hooks. Bill knives with curves and boning knives that have that hard curve next to the bolster. The ones I like to do with the edge behind all the time. I already have another video out there showing how to boning knives and you'll actually see me up here working and you'll see I actually put a little Nick on that leather belt, I just came up here to show you how. I will be working on a belt so be very very careful when you stop it, make sure your belt is moving away from you because if not you can cut and ruin your leather belt, another, a couple more tips to stop it if you have a hard to remove burr, you can turn the belt over and use the rougher side of the belt, which is also useful sometimes, and there are other types of things that you can tie with felt belts, is another one that is very effective.

To remove tough burrs, I have a felt belt somewhere in the store, but I don't have it here to show you, but it's literally just a belt made of felt and they make them for 1x3s. They make felt wheels. There are times when we stop and perfect. This is where you can get into the weeds when sharpening because you will see a lot of people pushing certain products and things to wear. Diamond, sprays, roues and different emotions. things you can put on them to get a better and even sharper knife do they work? I will tell you this, although it is a small difference from what I have shown in most of my tests.

It's not like a gigantic just a big difference and it's really for fans like me and a lot of the EDC guys. Do you know? We almost get to where we are dealing with golf scores because we will use a tool called a best tester that will tell us how accurate it is. A knife is scored by cutting a piece of monofilament line and if you use some of these methods you can lose a score of a really sharp knife, maybe 20 points and sometimes even less, on the score of the best tester, but generally when we're talking like kitchen cutlery and things like that, you're getting deep into the weeds and, in my opinion, you can waste a lot of time obsessing about, you know, like a guy who's constantly trying to get the score of golf, you can become obsessed with getting an incredibly low score from the best evaluator, so be careful, no, if you are going to go that route, it is a fantastic testing tool, it is a great way to see if certain methods work better than others and To also diagnose difficult CU knives, you will come across some knives that are great for sharpening, but generally you don't have to worry too much about all these different products that you will see people pushing, you know, that tells you.

Like, oh, this, you know, put this on your strap and it'll give you the best, sharpest knife in the world. They improve the things they do, but you know that many of them are very expensive and, in general, you don't really need them? most general sharpening and things you're doing now, if you're looking to get a mirror finish on your knife or something that's absolutely as close to the edge of a razor's edge, those types of products can be useful and that's it . So these are the basics of sharpening. I hope this video turned out well and the sound came out well.

I filmed all of this yesterday and the Lava Lar mic I was using picked up all kinds of static and it just didn't come out, so I'm having to re-record it today, so I hope it turned out okay and we'll see how it goes. Have a great day. Hello everyone. I'm Paul from Alexandria Knife Sharpening. I wanted to point out a couple of new changes to everyone if they come to my channel. up here you will see Alx Sharp.com and highlighted and ites and four more links to make things a little easier for everyone and to make it a little easier for me to answer things.

I added a link on my website and the links I use the most. If you click here, you'll see it will take you to my website and on my website I want to point this out to you. I have a section of four sharpeners and if you go here you will see that I have listed all the main tools that I use in my sharpening business and even the angle guides. I mean, there's a lot of stuff here, the safety equipment I use, the polishing and sanding equipment and the finishing equipment, right down to the rivets and all the things I need a knife for, so this is a great resource.

I'll try to keep adding this and I'm trying to make sure everything I use in my store is easily available to you there so you don't have to search. old links and old videos because I know I hate that when I have to do that, the other thing I would just ask is that if you haven't already, subscribe to the channel and if you have videos that you like, like it, all that helps. channel hugely and that's I just wanted to point out that change to you and as I mentioned earlier it also says four more links that you can also click on and I added some other great links here so Curry's custom Cutler Turner. wonders, uh, the guild of professional sharpeners and combat abrasives, so if you want to know more about all this, finish this section.

I recently made a video about it, it's pretty long, but I literally went through every item in there and talked a little bit about them, why I like them, and why they're there. Have a great day everyone.