Help sharpening Manix!

K

kyoung05

Joined
Oct 24, 2003
Messages
29
Ok, so I've had my Manix for several months now, and despite the size (I carry it in my front right pocket, and with jeans on, I seriously have a tough time reaching loose change at the bottom of my pocket. With dress pants, I probably would have to tighten my belt to account for the extra heft/weight;) ) Anyways, out of the box, it just amazed me how sharp the thing was. I mean, I had only had experience with a BM mini-AFCK and a Delica thus far, but the Manix easily blew them both away. I mean, I never thought a knife could shave cardboard like it was regular copy paper. Anyways...fast forward to today, and my problem is I cannot for the life of me get the Manix up to the level of sharpness it was at when I first got it. It got pretty dull one night when we were using it to slice up limes on a ceramic plate for mojitos. I mean it wouldn't even shave paper, and I think the edge was pretty dinged up. Anyways, I used my sharpmaker with both medium stones and fine stones to bring the edge back up to a useable sharpness. It'll shave paper no problem, and is "hair-popping" sharp. However, it is nowhere near as sharp as it used to be. I am using the 30 degree slots (I was told that S30V was a good enough steel that it'd hold an edge at 30 degrees with a problem), but I have a dragonfly in AUS-8 that gets wicked sharp on the 40 degree slots without much effort. I mean, I think that the dragonfly is probably sharper than I can make my Manix. I thought that I might need the ultra-fine stones or something, but if I can get my dragonfly "sticky-sharp", should't I be able to do the same for my Manix using the same stones? Would moving to the 40 degree slots help at all? I really don't want to sacrifice sharpness potential (does that make sense?) be going to a bigger angle if I don't have to. I will admit I am very new to sharpening in general, but I am able to sharpen my dragonfly without problems. I realize AUS-8 isn't going to be as hard to sharpen as S30V, but how much easier could it be?! Help please!
 
Go over the edge again at 30 degrees just to make sure. Afterward, strop the edge on a piece of leather, the back of a legal pad or the leg of a pair of jeans.
 
From my experience with S30V, if you have allowed it to get significantly blunt, you will need to put in a fair bit more work on the sharpmaker than the 20 strokes per side routine as outlined on the video.
I would just use the corners of the brown rods ( on the 30 slots if you wish to keep this angle ), sharpen one side only until a burr appears on the opposite side across the entire length. Then sharpen the other side only until the burr is removed and a burr appears across the entire length of the other side. Once you have done this, alternate strokes as per the Vid, corners then flats on the Brown, then corners, flats of the white fine rods. This should bring it back to out of the box sharpness. Raising the burr on each side is the key, it signifies that you are actually removing steal from the edge, not just the shoulder.

I prefer to touch up the edge on a frequent basis, before it gets too blunt, as it saves allot of time in the long run.
 
Thanks, I'll give it a try tonight. I had no intention of letting it get that dull. Who knew slicing up a few limes on a plate could wreak such havoc on a blade???
 
A couple of suggestions to help,

Indeed, a ceramic plate can be one of the most damaging things to a knife edge! Ceramic is much harder than a knife blade; ceramic is used to sharpen a knife, so that should give you some indication! So cutting anything on a ceramic plate will likely blunt an edge by rolling or denting the edge. Same goes for glass. Never use a glass cutting board!

To ensure you are hitting the very edge properly, coat the edge with a magic marker and then do a few strokes on your sharpmaker. If you are hitting the very edge, the edge will be shiny on the evry edge and will be black above that. If after doing a few strokes you see that the very ede is still black then you know you aren't even touching it with the sharpening stone yet, and you have many strokes to go.

If it is taking a while to get a sharp edge, I recommend thinning the edge on a much larger coarse stone first. This is also called grindign relief. The idea is to grind in main edge bevels that are at, say 26 degrees total so that when you o to your 30 degree setting on the Sharpmaker it should only take 20 strokes on the medium and 20 on the fine stones to set a micro bevel that is crazy sharp. The main edge bevel will be rougher looking, but feel free to polish that if you want.

I hope this helps!
 
Okay, so it took me about 1hr 15min on the corner of the medium brown stone to get a decent burr, but I did it. The rest was much faster, and I now have a pretty darn sharp edge on the knife. Now that I've learned my lesson the hard way about ceramic plates/glass, I will never let it get that dull again, primarily, because I don't ever want to have to sharpen it again. I'll touch it up once a week, but leave it at that. Hopefully it'll maintain a sharp edge. Anyone know if the ultra-fine stones give a much sharper edge? Thanks again guys!
 
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