New member, seeking advice

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Joined
Dec 13, 2009
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New users here. I have lurked around a little to see what you guys have and like the community. I have some background in carpentry, not necessarily wood carving. I build some furniture for funciton, not necessarily fit. I own several knives, gerbers, SAK, kabar, etc.

Flame me if I am doing something out of line here, but I am having a serious problem. I am using a homebrew strop I made and it is actually working against me. I put a solid edge on my knife with some 2000 grit and a mousepad and then when I strop, the edge dissappears. I'm not using any pressure and my angles don't shift. I am not rolling my wrists, when I get to the opposite edge of the strop, my stroke stops, I lift the blade up and set it back down.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am sure you guys were looking for another sharpening thread. lol
 
Hi and welcome to BF, it has helped me a lot and I hope it does the same for you. First thing that comes to mind based on what you said is that you are creating a burr that you cant see or feel. After you are done stropping, increase your angle slightly and take just a few extra light passes alternating each side to get the burr.

Another thing is, have you loaded your leather with any compound like diamond past or CrO? Plain leather can be coarser than you think. Other than that, I'm gona stick to suggesting you try raising the angle of the blade and giving it just a few SUPER LIGHT passes.
 
Yes, thats what I thought . Make sure your raising a burr on the first stone the coarse before proceeding to the higher grits . DM
 
Sometimes you can raise a small burr when creating the edge" making the knife seem sharp" then remove the burr on the strop" making the knife seem a bit duller". Convexed knives can be deceptively sharp compared to v-grinds because they dont have as big of a burr for most people.
 
So I took my crappest knife (some junk Maxam) and decided to reprofile the edge. So I took a sharpie and colored the edge to see what material I was taking off. I didn't stop honing until all of the marker was gone on both sides. Then to test, I colored it again and made 3 swipes on each side to make sure the blade was uniform. After I made the blade uniform, I used 2000 grit wet/dry on it. Then I stropped it. As of right now, each knife I own is sharp. I learned to never trust a factory edge, except for my SAK, they come ridiculously sharp and strop fine.
 
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