Edge Endurance Test

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KennyB

Joined
Jan 19, 2010
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Okay, so I have a problem where I spend a long time getting an edge as sharp as my abilities and patience permit, but then I wind up not really willing to use it on everything that I would use a lesser edge on. It gets to the point where my screaming sharp edge is really not all that great considering I'll often use much duller edges to accomplish a task that I'm worried will "dull" it. I just invest too much pride in the edges and I don't want to "ruin" them.

Well, I want to get over it, so I want to take one of my knives and just use the heck out of it, no touch ups, until it won't cut butter anymore. Just to see how long it takes, see how it performs in its "final throes", etc.

I don't know which knife to use though. These are the ones that I've narrowed it down to based on sharpness... Listed in no particular order

Benchmade Kulgera in S30V 30* inclusive, finished on 1K water-stone and satin polished on CrO
Buck 119 in 420HC at 30* inclusive, finished on 1K water-stone and lighly stropped
Case Trapper in "CV", clip at 30* inclusive, spey at 12* inclusive with 22* microbevel, finished on 1K water-stone and heavily stropped (not quite satin finish though)
Scrade Uncle Henry 885 stockman, not sure what angles, I transformed the clip into a chisel grind and then convexed the side with the bevel. I'd estimate it's at about 10* inclusive. This thing is the sharpest even though it's only finished on the 1K stone and no stropping.

So I've got a few tests to try it out with. I only really want to do one... I'm not sure I can stand "ruining" all of my edges. So far I've been leaning toward the Trapper, mostly because out of all of them it's the least sharp.
 
cant be very proud of your sharpening abilities if your not willing to put them to the test. but a couple things your likely to find out are, that the type of steel matters.. and resharpening still sucks.
 
use a knife with S30V, according to others it will be a while untill you have to sharpen it.
 
I wouldn't use my knife until it won't cut anymore. At least not on purpose, unless I had to. I try and keep my blades touched up. It's a lot easier to touch up a knife than it is to sharpen from butter knife to razor.

Just a thought.
 
I guess I don't understand why its taking you so long to sharpen, your not using that many steps so a 1k and a strop should not take that long. (10 minutes?)

I sharpened 5 knives today with a 1k and I don't think I spent over a hour. 3 large but cheap kitchen knives a CS AK-47 and a ZDP endura. Are you just spending excessive amounts of time stropping?
 
knifenut1013 said:
I guess I don't understand why its taking you so long to sharpen, your not using that many steps so a 1k and a strop should not take that long. (10 minutes?)

I sharpened 5 knives today with a 1k and I don't think I spent over a hour. 3 large but cheap kitchen knives a CS AK-47 and a ZDP endura. Are you just spending excessive amounts of time stropping?
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Yeah, I strop quite a bit... Usually like 100 strokes per side the first time. I give my Kulgera a lot more though since the S30V doesn't seem to respond that well to CrO.

I've been trying to figure out why it takes me so long as well. It's not that it's very difficult or I have troubles, I'm just slow. Remember that thread where I was talking about stroke speed? It seems I'm always sharpening with, "Slow and steady wins the race," mentality in my head. Makes it hard to really work that fast.

I think it's working the burr off at the end, because I like to get a burr on both sides with the 1K. Maybe I shouldn't be raising a burr at all? I've often wondered if I really need to raise one on both sides or at all. In any case, after I've raised a burr on each side I generally go side to side doing edge-leading strokes for a couple of passes to get the burr off (incrementally reducing pressure), and then do maybe 10 edge-trailing "stone stropping" passes and it takes care of the burr, but sometimes it can take me a little while to both get the burr off and not undo my progress.

I don't really take much time resharpening just on the 1K alone if that's all I'll need, but I still am pretty slow with it. I think the fastest I ever just touched a knife up on it free-handed was with my Kulgera, and that was like 30-45 minutes. I had trouble finding the burr that day too because I was outside. Haven't really kept track of other knives because I don't use them as much, but it seems like it generally takes a little over 30 minutes for a 1K touch up.

Anyway, it's not that I want to avoid spending that time again... I like sharpening. It's just that generally I wind up doing the job so much better than I thought I could that I don't want to lose it. It's really silly since the edge is no good if I don't want to use it. So that's why I'm gonna get over it by just starting to use 'em.
 
Kinda hard to imagine if stropping on CrO would do anything to an edge finished off of a 1k waterstone. Though 100 strokes seems a little excessive.

I typically dull my edge on a strop after about 10 strokes per side on 0.5 micron CrO and then 0.25 micron diamond spray. And while the edge got duller for whatever reason, I think it goes to show that the strop eats away at the edge more than you think.
 
Noctis3880 said:
Kinda hard to imagine if stropping on CrO would do anything to an edge finished off of a 1k waterstone. Though 100 strokes seems a little excessive.

I typically dull my edge on a strop after about 10 strokes per side on 0.5 micron CrO and then 0.25 micron diamond spray. And while the edge got duller for whatever reason, I think it goes to show that the strop eats away at the edge more than you think.
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Yeah, I only put it together to help deburr after the whole process as I found plain leather also worked, but it really helps quite a bit more than I thought it would. It doesn't really polish the scratches from the 1K out completely, but it definitely does some work on the edge, and something that gives the bevel face a little bit more sheen.

I'm getting a Norton 4000/8000 soon, which I expect will do the work that the strop is doing and more and make the whole process a lot faster.

I don't think I've ever dulled one of my knives on CrO outside of raising the edge too high. I have thought I noticed "over-stropping" before, but that was one night I decided to give my Kulgera something like 800 strokes per side, and I think I probably just wound up getting sloppy.
 
As was suggested, why not just use the knife regularly and touch up the edge frequently rather than getting it so dull that sharpening becomes a serious chore? If you wait until the edge is incredibly dull, you'll have to put in much more work, which seems to be one of the main reasons you don't want to use the knives in the first place. Use them regularly and touch them up so you don't have to spend nearly as much time on them. And IMO, stropping that much really doesn't affect the edge all that much if you've done the previous steps correctly.
 
BTW, if you look at So-Lo's youtube videos on sharpening, you'll see that he doesn't need to strop that much to get the edge to whittle hair by the weight of the hair.
 
Kaizen1 said:
As was suggested, why not just use the knife regularly and touch up the edge frequently rather than getting it so dull that sharpening becomes a serious chore? If you wait until the edge is incredibly dull, you'll have to put in much more work, which seems to be one of the main reasons you don't want to use the knives in the first place. Use them regularly and touch them up so you don't have to spend nearly as much time on them. And IMO, stropping that much really doesn't affect the edge all that much if you've done the previous steps correctly.
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No, it's not that sharpening it is a serious chore... I find things to sharpen just to sharpen them. I enjoy that aspect of it. It's just, I was so meticulous on these knives getting them as sharp as I could that I obsess over them. I touch them up on strops every night even if all I did was open up some food packages with them, and a lot of the times during the day when I need to do a task that I should do with a sharp knife that might end up damage it ( cutting a zip tie off of a metal pole for example ) I tend to not want to do it so that I don't mess up and have to put it on the coarse stone, as if I wouldn't be able to get the knife to the same level of sharpness again, but I mostly just feel like breaking the habit of being so obsessive with them that when I cut some letters open and break down soda boxes and I can't split/whittle hairs I go, "Oh, no, I have to strop to get it back!" Seems like if I'm just going to lose it the next time I cut a small amount of stuff I should just leave it off. It's been a while since I've let an edge go very far past that point so I thought it'd be interesting to actually give them a chance to see how they hold up.

So yeah, I'm just going to try to break that habit. There's no point in having my knives so sharp or knowing how to sharpen if I'm just going to avoid any serious cutting job that might slightly dull the edge or obsess about stropping them after extremely light cutting tasks.

Anyway, I think I settled on the Izula. I was thinking about the 119, but it's a little big for EDC carry which I want to do. Besides, the edge is already a little duller than the rest.

Edit

Also, I think I remember those videos, and while I'm not sure I suspect he was probably already coming off of a polishing stone after he stropped, so to me after using a strop after the 1K so much I would see why there wouldn't really be any room for improvement between the polishing stone and a strop, but I've been really surprised by how much it effects an edge off the 1K stone with the general consensus being that they're to be used after much higher grit progressions.
 
I use Spyderco sharpening stones, so I'm not sure how they compare to the 1k stone you're using, but something like whittling hair can be accomplished after the medium grit Spyderco stone if I wanted, without going on to the fine and ultrafine stones and the strop.

That aside, the only way to break to habit is to go crazy. Just have fun with it. I still don't see the need to get the knives too dull. Slicing up a pizza box into tiny pieces should be good.
 
S30V or any PM steel is a given with waterstones that it will take forever, not much you can do about it. 30 min on a 1k and I'd probably rip out what little hair I have left, have you thought about getting a diafold? it would make life much easier.

I think your over stropping the edge, 1k to 50k is a huge jump and though it does work to make a knife sharper there is a point where you begin to work against yourself.

Yes you should form a burr with the 1k but you should also refine it so it has the least amount of burr before stropping. Maybe limit yourself to 1 minute of stropping or less after the 1k. Or you could simply try finishing on the stone itself with no strop.

Don't worry about the speed of the stroke or how fast others do it, focus on making every pass count. The more accurate you are with every stroke the faster the process will go. And don't worry about using your edge, consider it a test of your sharpening ability and a way to find out how the steel performs against many objects.
 
knifenut1013 said:
S30V or any PM steel is a given with waterstones that it will take forever, not much you can do about it. 30 min on a 1k and I'd probably rip out what little hair I have left, have you thought about getting a diafold? it would make life much easier.

I think your over stropping the edge, 1k to 50k is a huge jump and though it does work to make a knife sharper there is a point where you begin to work against yourself.

Yes you should form a burr with the 1k but you should also refine it so it has the least amount of burr before stropping. Maybe limit yourself to 1 minute of stropping or less after the 1k. Or you could simply try finishing on the stone itself with no strop.

Don't worry about the speed of the stroke or how fast others do it, focus on making every pass count. The more accurate you are with every stroke the faster the process will go. And don't worry about using your edge, consider it a test of your sharpening ability and a way to find out how the steel performs against many objects.
Click to expand...

I've had my eyes on the Diasharps because I'm getting a little fed up with keeping my water-stone flatl, but I haven't really been in the position to buy new stones and kind of wanted to finish the Norton set before I tried diamonds.

One thing that puts me off against diamonds is that 320 grit for diamond doesn't seem to cut as aggressively as my 220 does, so I'd probably want to wind up buying a XC from DMT, but I'm not sure how the jump from XC to F on DMTs would be in comparison to what it's like to jump from 220 to 1000 on the Norton now.

I've been limiting myself on the stropping because I've had the same feeling of working against myself, but I haven't quite found the "limit" so to speak where it goes from improving to degrading. I know that every once in a while with very little use and stropping I'll find myself at the point where I have to put it back on the stone for it to get any better again, but that's generally a long way down the road.

30 minutes is actually a smaller window of time than I would expect to spend, so I guess I'm use to it. In any case, I don't really remove the burr from the stone on the strop--I don't even think I could. I remove it with the stone for the most part, and finish on the stone instead of the strop as you said--stropping on the stone like Murray Carter does. It's just sometimes I find that I'll have only enough of a burr on one side to be a problem, but that the 1K wont' take off without just rolling it to the other side. So that's why I started stropping; I kept stropping because it made my knives so much sharper. I mean, I never thought it would make much of a difference myself given the general logic with grit progression, but it helps out a lot. Maybe the reality is I'm doing a lousy job with the 1K at the final stages and the strop is just making up for it?

I'm expecting though that between the 1K and the CrO strop that when I get my Norton 4000/8000 I'll be doing everything I'm doing now by the time I get to the 8000 side, so I'm not really too worried about the time spent... It's almost more like I just don't want to let the edges dull at all after I put so much care into them. I mean, even if it took me ten minutes the level of concentration and everything I put into it still winds up making me go, "No, I want it to stay like it was when I took it off the stone."

I figure the more I sharpen on the stone, the more I'll reproduce that same edge and will "get over it" basically. So that's why I'm thinking of just letting it go really dull... Not so dull it won't cut anything at all since I'd be waiting a long time, but I remember I once let the Kulgera go until it wouldn't cut paper anymore and that wasn't a ridiculous length of time.

In any case, if I wanted to just sit down at the benchstone and "go nuts grinding" I'm pretty sure I'd come out with a "working edge" that would be pretty much as sharp as I get them down, but it wouldn't look that great... So I'm usually just a bit more uptight about that and I think that's why it takes me so long. Well, probably that an a mix of not doing it for very long, as I have gotten a lot faster than since I started if I really think about it.

Anyway, basic point is that I don't really mind sharpening ( in fact I enjoy them ) and so I'm not avoiding using my edges to avoid that, but I'm sick of regarding them as something that needs to be preserved instead of used.
 
I run into the same problem of ugly edges on the Paper Wheels, but I figure next time I ought to try and see if I can't get the best of both worlds by raising a burr on my DMT XC and convex the edge a little, then finish off on the slotted paper wheel. Though I feel a little worried that the polishing wheel won't completely remove the scratches from such a coarse stone.

I actually find that I like convex edges, it's just that I'm terrible at making and maintaining them.
 
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