I'm a sharpening Kung Fu Master!

Originally posted by Rev. Pete
Thank you to all the contributors on this thread for taking the time to share your sharpening techniques. For each of you my question is "where did you get your strop and stropping compound". I know this has been asked and answered before, but please humour me.
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Reverend Pete,
I start off with a piece of undyed tooling grade leather, about belly hide weight. It can be got at a Tandy leather and craft supply or saddle shop or boot/shoe maker or saddle shop, it depends on where you live.
Cut a piece about 18 inches long by 1-1/2 -3 inches wide, depending on the size knives you will be sharpening. You don't want the leather to be too much wider than the knives you'll be stropping or the tip will hang up so it's safer to go slimmer than wider, also a 1-1/2 -2 or 3 inch strop gives you plenty of room to maneuver without having to work too hard on controlling your angles.
The compound I have always used is a jewelers grade called White diamond but Fulloflead got his at a Sears where the buffing compounds are located, they come in several different colors. The color signifies the grit, red being strictly rouge for finish polishing only and the white diamond is for the real stropping. Don't use the two compounds on the same side of the strop because it will throw off your evenness. After you have your length of leather cut punch a hole about an inch from the top, put a stout piece of cord long enough to hook over a doorknob or whatever you're going to hang your strop on, make sure it's something very strong because you don't want it turning loose while you're stropping, this could cause a big mess!
Load the strop up with the compound just like you're coloring with a crayon, it's easier if you break off a hunk because the whole brick is unwieldly. After you get a good coat on the ROUGH side of the leather put a blade to it and strop it in, as it starts to turn black or shiny add more compound, it's very important to work a lot of the compound in before you get into serious stropping. You'll be able to tell when you have began to get it started because you will notice that it's polishing much faster. When you have a good start to seasoning then go to work with a blade, between strokes work more compound into the strop, it takes a while to get a strop seasoned but once you do it doesn't take as many applications of compound. A thing to remember, you cannot put too much compound on the strop, any excess that doesn't work in will just come off on your knife. Keep stropping and applying compound occasionally wiping your blade off and testing the edge. If I haven't answered any questions or you need to know more info feel free to e-mail me and ask, I'm always glad to help.
Best of luck,
Specops :)
 
Great info, and many thanks to all the contributors to this thread. This is by far the most interesting thread I have read in a LONG time!
 
Congrats! Feels great the first time it all comes together.

I don't know about you, but to develop better skills, I need a challenge. You too? Okay, here's a sharpening challenge, then:

One day I take my knife off my x-fine hone, and find it doesn't shave hair. Dang, I obviously messed up. So I take the knife and strop it, and now, voila!, it shaves hair. I started coming to the conclusion that the strop was "cheating" -- even if you don't do a perfect sharpening job, the strop can cover it up and make the knife shave hair anyway.

So, I started challenging myself to make sure that the knife always shaves hair when it comes off the x-fine hone. But then, I think to myself, why stop there? Why not do such a killer job that it shaves hair coming off the fine hone? Or the medium hone? So, I followed the reductio ad absurdum to the end: I did a very careful job on an x-coarse hone, and got the knife to shave hair right off that hone. Yeah, okay, it tugged and pulled and I wouldn't shave with it for a million dollars, but hair shaved off.

The moral: the less perfect your bevels, the more fine the polish before the knife shaves hair. But if you start working backwards, and get the bevels as perfect as possible on even the coarser hones, it will feel even more outrageously sharp as you polish it.

So here's the challenge: next time, get the knife to shave hair easily coming right off your last stone, before you strop. Once you can do that, see if you can get it shave off the previous stone before that.

Joe
 
Originally posted by Joe Talmadge
So here's the challenge: next time, get the knife to shave hair easily coming right off your last stone, before you strop. Once you can do that, see if you can get it shave off the previous stone before that.

Joe
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That sounds like an excellent challenge. I may just do that.
I was thinking of something opposite too though.
When I start to strop I start with a knive that will already shave. I'd like to start with a duller and duller knife and still recover it with the strop.

That one isn't really a challange though. I'm sure it will happen naturally as I continually try to keep my knives sharp by stropping alone.

According to SPECOP's theory, if you strop often you should never have to go back to the stone.
 
Originally posted by fulloflead
According to SPECOP's theory, if you strop often you should never have to go back to the stone.
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A lot of edge degradation can happen from indents and chips and impaction. Stropping will address those if they are minor, but once they become anywhere close to visible, you really need to re-sharpen to get the edge back to where it should be. And take the opportunity to grind in more relief to keep performance up to par for things other than shaving.
 
I know that most everyone loves a high polished edge and use the strop to maintain that edge. My question is does anyone use a strop to maintain a coarser edge? Will a strop work just as well for coarse edges as it seems to for the high polished edge?
 
I have always heard for one to use a flat strop for knives. I just have to disagree with this. The best strop that I have used is a hanging red Russian leather. The red Russian leather is in a league of its own. The trick is to not let the strop hang-through. Keep it as taught as possible. Keep the spine of the knife as close as possible to the leather. I use strop dressing on the Russian leather to condition it or break the leather in. The Russian leather is already very supple when it is new. The dressing is only a grease made out of animal fat. Big D1
 
Wow, inspired by the posts in this thread, I made my own makeshift little flat strop with a piece of wood, the back of a notebook and some jeweler's rouge.

It works great. Give me 2 more minutes, I'll have bare legs. :)

***edited to add:

Gross, there's little leg hairs all over the floor now. Hehe.
 
Keep it up guys..this is one of the best threads ever! I love sharpening knives too and only wish I could convey my words as well as you guys do.
I have been playing around with convex edges and maintaining them with stropping and it's been lots of fun...I"m beginning to really like those convex edges! I have a belt sander but it's so much fun doing it freehand. I also like steeling to maintain blades too, there are just lots of ways to maintain blades and they're all fun!!
 
Big D1 have you ever tried useing your Russian strop with a flat backing instead of hanging and pulling tight? If so did you see a difference?
 
Originally posted by db
I know that most everyone loves a high polished edge and use the strop to maintain that edge. My question is does anyone use a strop to maintain a coarser edge? Will a strop work just as well for coarse edges as it seems to for the high polished edge?
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Some steels don't want to give up their burr with coarser grits. A double-grinding followed by a *light* stropping often helps get rid of the burr. Don't strop too much, because then you will start to lose the effectiveness of your coarse edge.

Here's the procedure I follow when I have a knife that absolutely refuses to give up its burr. I take the knife all the way to x-fine, do the prescribed ultra-light double-grind, then strop that baby until the burr is completely gone. Okay, now I have a knife that will shave hair like nobody's business, but won't slice worth anything. Now I go back to the stone that I want for the final finish (for me, usually 300-400ish grit), and VERY LIGHTLY take a few swipes to rough the edge back up. It's got to be very light, or you'll raise a burr again, and you're back to the drawing board. So, in summary, there are times I find I need to go high-grit to get rid of the burr, and when that happens, no reason not to go back to the coarse stone to rough the edge back up.

Joe
 
db, nope I have never tried to put it on a flat backing. I would like to get a piece of the Russian leather and glue it to a piece of wood and try it out.

I have used numerous flat strops, and I have yet to achieve the kind of edge I can get with a Russian leather hanging strop. More or less, I believe, it boils down to technique. My stropping technique is just better with a hanging strop than with the flat strops. The suppleness of the Russian leather also helps a lot. Big D1
 
I'd like to mention that I got my Spyderco Ronin sharp enough to cut a freehanging hair taken from my wife's head also (inspired by having read this post a while ago).

So, then I took another swipe at it and cut it in half again, and again and again (I'm really proud of myself now) and another and another and then...HEY...Oh SHITE!!! I'm bleeding pretty good...didn't feel a thing...

We need to do stupid things like this from time to time to teach us NOT to do stupid things like this from time to time. (I do anyway)

So thanks fulloflead.

-John
 
Fantastic thread.
Thank you.

I have one question.
I strop and understand the benefits.

However I do not understand how a blade can be
repeatably sharpened just by stropping.
Surely repeated stropping is going to round over the actual
cutting edge.
Even if the blade spine is almost touching the leather the edge is going to sink into the strop and naturally as the blade moves, the released leather will rebound and in so doing , round over the tip.
This might take a while , but surely the edge angle is going to
eventually loose it sharpness.

For this NOT to happen, something else must be going on and I have missed that.
 
I'm interested to know how the hair-splittin' sharp blade cuts corrugated cardboard or something equally fibrous. I know you want a rough/grabby/toothy edge for that in general, but if something is sharp enough to split a hanging hair, I suspect it could cut some carboard too.
 
Originally posted by Specops
I'm always happy to help a fellow knife lover...
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Hi Specops. This is definately the best thread I've read anywhere in a long time.

I was thinking. What if you were to write a take-us-by-the-hand tutorial on making an out-of-the-box knife into a surgical instrument?

TIA,

Al
 
im' sure i'm not the only one who's a visual learner... any good videos with stropping/sharpening demonstrations you can recommend? i could still see myself f*cking up pulitzer prize-winning verbal instructions on this subject.
 
Which strop at Knifecenter did you order? Their descriptions don't quite let me figure it out. Thanks. Great thread!

Gordon
 
Originally posted by Nosmo
However I do not understand how a blade can be
repeatably sharpened just by stropping.
Surely repeated stropping is going to round over the actual
cutting edge.

For this NOT to happen, something else must be going on and I have missed that.
Click to expand...

When I had a spyderco meerkat(navigator style), all it saw was a strop over the months that I used it. Some shifts it saw 60+ boxes that had to be collapsed or deflapped. 2.0micron strop compound on the side of my doublestuff stone case, edge ended up a little convexed, but it'd shave or slice hanging TP just as easily as it cut cardboard.
 
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