Sharpening new SOGs

New Pig Hunter said:
I've no experience with Spyderco's or Lansky's or the like......

but always looking for the easiest solution (i.e., cheapest & least labor intensive) a few months ago I found a Smith's knife sharpener plastic thingie for $5. You know the kind, it has carbide cutter blades, and you grab the handle and drag it down the blade.

well, I put the Smith's thingie in the vise and using a very firm grip on the knife handle and applying heavy pressure.... I drug the blade across the cutters. I tell ya, I was getting chips coming off !! After a few drags I had a nicely re-profiled edge that was sharp enough to cut some arm hair. Then after wailing away on my leather strop (with lots of green micro-fine honing compound) I now had an edge that was arm hair de-foresting S-H-A-R-P !!

I use the Smith thingie & stropping method on all my knives, SOG's and Kabar's and everything.... I discovered a $5 solution to re-profiling and razor sharp.

And of course, there's always the exception to the rule and that is the SOG Recondo: that BG-42 steel just laughs at those carbide cutters.

Cheers,

Carl
Click to expand...
Have an EdgePro sharpener but NPH is correct inthat those carbide plastic handled sharpeners will put a sharp edge on the softer steels very quickly and even some of the harder ones with a little exta pressure. :thumbup:
 
Richard, great news !!! yet another method of scary sharpening: polishing compound, most excellent solution.


SO, advice & suggestion being what they are, yesterday I found an exception to my Smith's rule.... and I'm not necessarily happy about it.

Here's the horror story, with sort of a "happy" but very compromised ending. I relate this tale simply to warn y'all that this is not a perfect world. I know you know that, but such wisdom always bears repeating when sharing new knowledge based on misfortune.

One of the knives needing some serious sharpening yesterday was my Hankins Dark Night Fighter. An awesome handful of knife.... two handfuls actually.
Anyway, the blade steel is O-1. I don't know what kind of edge grind Hankins uses but I figured the Smith's thingie would re-profile as necessary. Randall uses O-1 steel and I've Smith'ed my Randall with no ill effects. Therefore I "assumed" that Hankins' O-1 wouldn't be a problem. And therein lies the tale because of the "a" word we'all know to be one of Murphy's favorite corollaries.

Well, lemme tell ya, the Smith's thingie was NOT the correct tool for the Hankins job !! I started draggin' and draggin'.... for those of you that have ever done any lathe work, you know what "chatter" is, where the cutting tool skips a bit and the surface gets bumps in it.
Well, I'm draggin' the Hankins and all of a sudden I get chatter and now had something of a mini-serrated edge on the Hankins !! So to fix that nightmare I increased the pressure and drug the blade across the cutters..... WRONG thing to do. You know how it goes: in this situation I substituted "more pressure" for "bigger hammer."

For a reason I don't understand more pressure against the Smith's cutters only caused more chattering with more resultant serrating. Now I don't like a serrated edge so I figured I'd try some stropping to ease my pain.
I discovered that 0.5 micron just doesn't cut enough to fix the problem.

Maybe the temper of the O-1 steel Hankins uses is different from a Randall's O-1 temper, with resultant Rc differences. No idea (yet) but what a mess I created of the Hankins.

So as a last-ditch effort before mailing the knife back to Hankins I got out my homemade lansky-style sharpener (recall I enjoy the home handyman's cheap and easy way of doing things) and bolted-in the Hankins. Then I got out a small DMT diamond stone and proceeded to re-profile the Hankins. (Man, is Robert ever gonna be p.o.'ed at me if he sees what I did to his masterpiece.....).
Anyway, I used the diamond stone and really did a job to remove a lot of O-1 and create a new "NPH edge profile." I never did get all the mini-serrations removed but I decided enough was enough with the diamond, so I commenced to stropping.

The "happy" part is that the Hankins is now razor sharp, as proven by all the arm hair I de-forested (a la the back of Richard's hand).
The less-than-happy part is that there is still a bit of super-small mini serration to a couple of sections of the edge which are visible to the naked eye.
The compromise is that the edge is sharp-sharp-sharp !!!

Moral Of The Story: be careful and always have a backup plan based on desperation and diamond stones.

Cheers,

Carl
 
The talk of sharpeners that sharpen knives until they are sharp enough to shave without touching the skin really makes my hair stand....Hopefully I can get a better shave than the Gillete M3! :p
 
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