Evolution of Sharpening methods

D

Danketch

Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
583
Hello All,

I just got finished restoring the point on my Bark River Bravo Necker 2. I strictly used my Fallkniven DC4 for this, and it worked great.

I backed over this knife with my truck a month or so ago- loose factory kydex sheath, made it fall out when I was lifting my toolbox in the bed, didn't notice til I came home that day. The result of that running over wasn't actually too bad, just a few chips on the belly. I took those out with the DC4 as well.

I guess I thinned the point a lil too much, bc my buddy broke about .070" of the tip yesterday when we were trying to dig his arrow out of a tree.

Well about 30 minutes on the DC4, mainly 20 mins or so on the diamond side, and the rest on the ceramic side, and it was back with a mo stouter point.

I took a tip from Heavy Handed, and instead of using my leather strop, wrapped some printer paper around the DC4, and stropped with Bark River Black and White compound, and I am back to shaving hairs with this thing.

Also, just want to say the DC4 stone is excellent. I have 3 DC3's strapped to my Fallknivens in various packs, and wish I would have ordered a DC4 first, as the increase in size and ease of use is well worth the $6 or so price difference. Sharpens CPM3v no problem.

This is a far cry from my initial beginnings in convex sharpening, where I just tried to strop everything with black compound on a leather strop. I mainly use circular scrubbing motions on a stone, as I found this actually gets me tangible results in a short time period.

My pops never taught me how to sharpen a knife, I just got an Arkansas stone kit when I was a kid, and was kind of just expected to figure it out, and I never did.

Thanks to this forum, I have figured out how to get stuff sharp for me.

Anybody else have an evolution in sharpening methods?
 
My first sharpening experience was using raw sandstone at my cabin to put an edge back on my first hatchet. I was 6 or 7 at the time, so it's somewhat amazing that what I did worked at all.

Through my young life I always had a few small aluminum oxide or diamond stones sitting around for maintaining pocket knives and trying to adjust kitchen knives, but most of what I did was unsophistocated and had unimpressive results.

It was during college that I got really into kitchen knives and got my first water stones (8"x3"). This was a whole different world, and I quickly learned about burs and proper apexing. I spent some time just putting razor edges on my cooking knives, then decided to play around with blade geometry.

In the last few years I have become a big fan of convex blade geometry and I am very good at establishing whatever geometry I want free-hand. I started working on swords, hunting knives, and carpentry tools, and got better equipment for stropping.

I can now manipulate geometry pretty much as I want, put a mirror polish on most blades, and produce consistent shaving quality edges on basically anything I want to. Unfortumately, this came with the realization that knife sharpening is a lot deeper than I had originally thought. Choosing optimum geometry and getting blades perfectly symmetric is incredibly difficult. People who make knives for a living often still don't have the hang of making symmetrical grinds. Even worse, edge polishes are an incredibly complicated subject. Stropping is a primitive method that is utterly inadequate for bringing out the grain of metal or showing off temper lines. There is an entire art in Japan surrounding the use of natural stones to bring out textures that characterize the steel's quality. Learning how to do these things takes years and years of practice, a lifetime dedicated to the craft. In that light, my skills are rather pathetic really...
 
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Thanks for the input, but you don't have to write your comments in "spy mode", this is a pretty good forum for learning and sharing, and its good to hear other peoples opinions.
 
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