New to the Knife Sharpening

I hand sharpen, free hand.

I think the first question you should answer is

-what kind of knives do you have/want?

- there are user edges, and collector edges.
A user edge needs to work, it needs to be sharp and stable.....a collectors edge needs to look good. Different knives might require different tools and techniques.

-where, do you want to be able to sharpen them?
(In the woods, your back tailgate of your truck, or in your basement shop?

-budget and time commitment?
 
You might take a look at a Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker. They are inexpensive, easy to use and you can watch a YouTube video on it before you buy one.

I have a Lansky, Edge Pro and the Sharpmaker. There are times when it is really convenient to get the Sharpmaker out rather than the Edge Pro because it is easy and quick.
 
Nobody seems to mention it but when you come to the subforum here titled :

Maintenance, Tinkering & Embellishment​


just above the list of thread titles is a blue section with thread titles inside the blue area. These are called 'Stickies' meaning they don't get shifted down and away with time but remain at the top of the subforum here.

In the list of Stickies are several highly evolved topics on sharpening.

The short version , if I may , get a dambed coarse stone first on the order of 220 grit ( extra coarse ).
Get some kind of Strop , not a razor belt type strop , a rougher strop attached to a rigid surface like a hunk of flat wood.

That will get you going.
From there you may want to add :
smoother finer grit stones ( but those take more skill to use.
A smooth / hard leather strop maybe a few of these ; some with abrasive that you add and at least one just hard smooth bare leather.

Those Stickie threads will tell you what to do with this stuff.

The key to an edge that will impress you is to keep the combined two angles of the edge pretty narrow ( acute ) on the order of 30 degrees . I like MUCH LESS than that ~ 25 degrees for both bevels combined .
AND
when you rub those bevels into the edge of your blade keep the way you hold the bevel consistent / the same every stroke ( yah good luck with that but that is what you MUST do ).

Get some kind of jeweler's loop so you can look at those FLAT bevels you are making so you can see if you are indeed , making them flat / the same angle consistantly.

You will make a """ Bur""" eventually. Study the hell out of what a bur is , how to control it and how to get rid of it THE RIGHT WAY .
If you do this last step RIGHT ( get rid of the bur ) you will end up with a durable sharp edge .
Get in a hurry and cheat and you will drive yourself insane and never have a usable knife.

The worst mistake I made , and it went on for a decade . . . well a few decades , since I was a kid . . . I used too fine a stone and kept trying to angle the knife up to " get to the edge " rather than use an extra coarse stone and MAKE A NEW EDGE ! ! ! ! !

( and yes I am now insane as a result. don't let this happen to you. Get an extra coarse stone ! ! ! ) 🙂
 
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There are several books on sharpening you can find on line as well as YouTube demos. I prefer freehand sharpening. A set of diamond hones (coarse, fine) and an angle guide are all you need to sharpen just about anything (except politicians' wits). This forum is a great resource as well.
 
Knife collecting and knife sharpening are separate hobbies and the rabbit holes for both are very deep.
 
I highly recommend the Knife Deburring book. I spend 25 or 30% of my time “sharpening “ and 70 or 75% of my time stropping.
The other thing I did was to buy a BESS sharpness tester. It really made a HUGE difference in what I strop with and how I go about it. It’s tough to quantify how you’re doing when stropping. With a tester it takes the guess work out of it.
Those two things will speed up your learning curve dramatically.
Don’t get hung up on the techniques in the “Deburring book. There are many ways to get knives “scary” sharp…. IMHO
 
Gottagofishn said:
I highly recommend the Knife Deburring book.
Click to expand...
I can in emphatically second that .
I can easily tell the degree of sharpness and even sharpening angle ( between say , 15° perside vs 12° ). I have been doing this so long all I have to do is take the sharpened edge to the flat of my thumb nail , starting out so shallow that the edge won't catch and gradually raise the angle until it bites . That is part of telling the angle. Next comes edge keeness ; if the edge just bites then it is sharp enough , if it bites and kind of sinks in a micro-micro in that kind of sickening way then it is BETTER (easily hair whittling ) . . .
nnnnnext comes the end of fingernail test ( I especially enjoy this one ) if I can take a curl off the end of my fingernail , alllll the way across , like a clipping , dominate hand on the knife , THEN the behind the edge thickness is adequate ( 0.012 inch or so ) and we are getting down around 12° perside.

Finally if I can take a curl off with my non dominate hand on the knife then we are talking 0.010 inch or less behind the edge and I am grinning like an evil child .
This came up today at work . . .
ha ha
a year or so ago I worked with a young man for a while and he said he was a relation to Bob Kramer , theeeee Bob Kramer .
I didn't know anything about him , I am embarassed to say . Seems like he never comes up 'round here . . .

Turns out I was working on a Cold Steel regrind , Master Hunter in 3V . I took like a millimeter and a half off each side of the blade at the spine and went sub 10 thou ( inch ) behind the edge . . . aaaahhhh NOW THAT I can use and smile at the same time.

Then I had a thought : I asked the new guy if he wanted to send his uncle or what ever a video .
I very slowly , under easy control , cut a curl off a fingernail with my non dominate hand on the knife and stopped just as the curl was about to drop off but it hung on .

In my most childish moments I picture Bob staying late after work trying to duplicate that .
Probably I am so full of it I should be taken out and fed to the wolves but . . . there you have it .
ha ha ha

er , stropping ; deburing and stuff ; that's important
 
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The powered option that I tried that was the fastest to provide a sharp edge with minimal learning was a WorkSharp belt driven sharpener. I am not sure that this is what you mean by "learning to sharpen", however. Of course, the faster something sharpens, the faster you can mess it up.

I now own a Ken Onion version as well as the Tool sharpener and I usually just use the tool sharpener if I want fast.

I really like the Spyderco Sharpmaker because it is pretty easy to hold a knife vertically and simply swipe down. Very very slow if you want to reprofile and you are limited to 15 or 20 degrees per side, but I still like it.

Especially when I am traveling, it is hard to beat a simple single stone such as a Sharpal dual-grit diamond. The stone is decent and it is a great starter stone because it can sharpen any steel and you do not need oil. I also like the Norton India stones or Silicon Carbide stones for similar reasons, but over time they will dish and you need oil, which can be a problem if traveling. If you are just sharpening knives, maybe dishing is not as large a problem.

I really like my Hapstone (recent purchase), but it is expensive to jump in and I do not see how to sharpen very small blades with the Hapstone. I have a far more consistent edge with the Hapstone than with any of the other methods I have used.

Finally, understand what steel that you want to sharpen. I have never tried to sharpen REX 121, but I own one that I have not had to sharpen yet. When I do sharpen it, however, I will use diamonds or CBN on my Hapstone. I believe that my "sandpaper" belts on my Worksharp are probably Aluminum Oxide, not sure how that will work on REX 121. Works fine on D2.

That said, my first Kitchen knife I sharpened, it was on my Waterstones (I am a woodworker so I own many waterstones as well as a Tormek T8).
 
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