WHY YOU CANT GET A RAZOR EDGE

Being a custom knife maker craftsman and an outdoorsman, sharpening is pretty much my job at this point, I sharpen all the time, so I thought I would share some of that knowl

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with you who are having trouble with sharpening with your hand free, so let's get started. I started so I have a lot of sharpening videos online, if you want to see some of them, click on that length that's under the top corners of the screen now and you can check out a whole accumulation of sharpening videos throughout the years because I have many There is a lot of online content like that.

I get a lot of questions almost daily, a lot of emails and Facebook messages asking me to identify certain problems with your sharpening and basically it comes down to two main questions, those two are: why can't I answer? a very sharp

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and why my edge doesn't last, so I'm going to address those two questions, what are the common mistakes that people make and how you could identify what you're doing wrong and get a better advantage, for a demonstration. purposes, let's use one of my customs here. I just finished, but let's start with the most basic part and that is the choice of stone.

Now it turns out to be a sharp pebble. This is what we will use today. video was a gift from Sharp Pebble if you want to watch them, do so. I'll throw a link to your site in the description. I guess they didn't ask me to review this or anything, they just sent it. as a gift, thank you very much. Share Pebble for providing the stone for this video. It is a stone choice. The most important thing is the grain grade, so you want to start with a grain that is effective. I started by sharpening with a 1000 grit stone.

That's fine if your knife isn't in too bad condition, but if it's in bad shape, you'll want a hone or stone. 400 is a beautiful grit. You see, this is a combination of 400 and 1000 grit stone, so we get both grits with this. a stone is a pretty coarse stone and you get a lot of life out of it, but a 400 grit works fine. 1000 important. One important thing, since we're talking about grains here, is that you don't want two larger steps between your grains. or you probably won't remove the scratches from the previous stone, so if you go from, say, four hundred to 3000, you will have to work a long time on that 3000 grit stone to remove all the scratches from the 400 because the 3000 grit stone it's just not thick enough to cut the material, so going from 400 to 1000 and 1000 to 3000 and then three and another thousand grits, those increments are small enough to efficiently remove those scratches and make sure get a good head start now that we are about to start sharpening and we come to some main questions: can I do forward and reverse movements?

I absolutely do cutting and strapping motions, no need to lift the stone to reset it. every time that will give you a problem maintaining your angle, now the angle we are going to talk about is the most common problem I see with people who sharpen is maintaining that angle, that is the whole skill and difficulty with sharpening a Show of hand is that your angle. It's not fixed for you, how do you find your angle when you start sharpening? So I recommend laying the sheet flat on the surface. Observe that shadow under the blade you are going to watch closely as you tilt the blade up until the shadow disappears once the shadow disappears you know there is no space between the vertex of the stone and that is your sharpening angle , now you want to keep it as good as possible while sharpening, if you need to keep checking, what I found is a good good reference, is get to that point and then just put my finger under it, how much space is there under the spine of the blade, so it should be able to place my finger about a quarter of an inch in there, okay, that's a good reference point and just try to keep it along the entire edge and that will help you maintain the angle, but be careful when you're sharpening, do not start sharpening violently and without paying attention to your angle, you must constantly observe the distance between the spine of the knife and the stone, that shadow on the edge, constantly check now, as I said, maintaining that angle is difficult, that's all the scale with freehand sharpening and I just want to briefly mention another thing I hear a lot and that is people complaining about why their edges aren't good so yeah your age probably isn't good because you don't hold that angle consistently enough, but don't expect to get there overnight.

I spent many hours sharpening and getting poor edges. Just because I couldn't hold that angle well enough, I got a lot of emails from people who have had their new stones for a couple of days and are wondering why they still can't get a sharp edge, they can't. It's that easy, it takes time, it requires consistency and you have to like it. I said be careful while sharpening. What mistakes am I making? Am I maintaining that angle consistently? The next tip imagines the edge of a knife. Okay, so this is like a cross section of a knife. blade, so here's your apex, here's your bevel on the opposite side of the knife, okay, here's a piece of steel, the face of your blade with a beautiful KN stamp, okay, great, no, don't sharpen it with 400 grit, that will create scratches on that blade like this.

Imagine this on a microscopic scale, we have these big 400 grit scratches. Now what happens is when you move on to a finer grit stone, you need to replace these scratches, so it's a 400 grit scratch. Now you move on to a 1000 grit and I need this now, what happens and what I have seen happen on different blades that have come to me to sharpen is that people don't spend enough time on each stone, they are jumping to other stones, I understand that. a little excited to get to the end and see what your edge looks like and you end up with a whole mix of scratches on that sheet so you have some nice 1000 grit scratches and then you might have missed a patch there so it's You might have some nice scratches and your Miss Apache and you end up with this ugly and blotchy thing will be completed without a nice finish and your edges are really inconsistent so you have little bits and you scrape pieces of it along your edge and you just it's not nice. finish, take your time, take pride in your work and pay attention to what that edge looks like, feel very lightly along the edge and see if it's grabbing in certain places and where it might need a little more attention now, let's say you've sharpened all the way through your grains and you're getting to the last few steps or the last few strokes.

I always recommend that your final strokes on a stone be sharp strokes throughout the entire process. Yes you can do back and forth strokes but you are I'm going to draw a little bird edge with wire, the bird is what people in the sharpening community call it and I find that strapping strokes tend to really create that burr because you're pulling the metal out toward the edge a little bit more, so I like to finish with Just cuts like that, the pressure should lighten as the process goes, so now, finishing at 8,000, you shouldn't use as much pressure as when you started at 400 or even when you started at 8,000 I.

I would like to lighten my pressure constantly throughout the process. Okay, so we assume that we've created a very nice border here now at this point up to 8000 grit, which is a very high grit. Now many people stop here and check. its edges I'm still not smooth as butter shave my hair with a sharp edge I'm going to tell you not to underestimate what a strop is capable of doing. I've had so many edges that just weren't there because of the stones that with just half a dozen you run a strop a leather strap with a polishing compound just brought it up to a level just up to that butter smooth edge a strop with some compound like that's less aggressive than the stone is gentle on the blade and it's going to convex a little bit and Make sure you level that edge where there might be those little inconsistencies that you left with your stone.

A sharpener will actually clean it now, if you remember at the beginning of the video I said there are two main problems that people have when sharpening. one was that they're not getting that sharp edge and the edge doesn't seem to last. Now let's address the second one, that your age doesn't last first. An age that comes to an absolutely sharp point is not going to maintain that. With an edge that long, you've created a very fine, delicate edge there and you can't expect it to say shaved hair if you're stripping wires with it and even cutting cardboard, people don't do that.

Notice the abuse an edge takes when you run through a cardboard with that abrasive grain grain inside the cardboard. I think it's like some kind of clay material running through it, which is very thick and sandy, which is just brutal on one edge, so don't do it. Don't expect to be cutting up cardboard boxes and still come in and shave your face at the end of the day, shave your 5 o'clock shadow, it's just not going to happen, so I think a lot of times people have unrealistic expectations about their knife. and the steel they have something else, I think when we talked about that burr before, people are finishing the edge with that little burr that is left there and if you imagine that fine steel wire hanging from your edge now the burr is really felt sharp and grippy when you cut a paper, it might even do a beautiful job of cutting that piece of paper, but as soon as you bump into something a little hard like a piece of wood or fall even on a wooden boat cutting board, you just flatten that burr or it breaks off and then you're left with a rolled edge at a very microscopic level or you're left with a little bit of a crumbly edge or a rough edge, that's what's happening so make sure you get rid of that burr and make sure you have realistic expectations about your knife steel so that's it for this video guys if you liked it hit the like button to comment below if you have any other ideas besides what I cover here in this video of course .

There are a lot of things to figure out, but I only address what I think are the most common. Yes, you guys who have some experience in sharpening or if you are stuck on your problem, also comment below. I will fix your comment, maybe we can I can help you subscribe to my channel if you haven't hit the like button yet, if you are very kind would you share thanks for watching, we will see it in the next video.