Thanks to everybody that recommends the sharpie technique

G

grthomas

Joined
Apr 7, 2008
Messages
15
New guy here.

I wanted to thank the folks that mentioned the sharpie technique.

Recently lost my standby Swiss Army Knife. Really bummed about it because I actually bought it in Switzerland on vacation one year.

So, I've been fiddling around with replacing it with various cheap target knives. I decided to upgrade to something a little better after the Gerber couldn't really even handle whittling out a couple of hot dog cooking sticks for the kids.

Anyway, I ended up with a CRKT M4 that was an REI deal of the day a few weeks back and I finally decided to settle down and sharpen it.

So, I spend about an hour last night on the sharp maker and no matter how careful and deliberate I was keeping the blade straight up and down, I couldn't get the burr off of the left side of the blade.

I was cursing the steel they used and everything else i could think of. So, finally i remember reading about the sharpie trick on here a few times and decided to give that a go.

Turns out that on the right side of the blade, I was hitting only the very tip and on the left side, I was hitting way up on the shoulder.

I rotated the blade about 5-10 degrees to the right and finally had the knife sharp (very sharp for me) in about 5 - 10 more minutes.

So, of course, I'm grateful for the trick, but at the same time a little frustrated in the sharpening quality control of the factory sharpening technique. It's almost as if the blade wasn't straight when it ran through what ever process they use at the factory. It seems like a 40 degree edge, but instead of 20/20, it's more like 30/10

anyone else ever run across this? I'd prefer to be able to hold it straight up and down, perhaps, i'll monkey with getting it straight some other weekend.
 
I have found a few blades with unequal bevels. I use a silicon carbide stone to rebevel the edges, in the process eveninging them out so each side is at the same angle. Then I switch to the Sharpmaker to set the final edge angle and final sharpen.

You can do the whole job on the Sharpmaker if you don't mind taking a long time at it. The Sharpmaker dark rods are not very coarse and do not remove much material on each stroke. So it takes a long time, but can be done.
 
I have seen the Sharpmaker Diamond stones often recommended for re-profiling. Using the medium stones to re-profile will be a long and arduous task. One word of caution: the design of the Sharpmaker makes it easy to round off the tip of a blade by letting the tip slide off the stones at the bottom of the strokes which would require more reprofiling which would require more... Be careful to stop your downward stroke before the tip of the blade slides off the stone.
 
More often than seeing the diamond stones recommended, I've seen them being described as overpriced, given their functionality. What I, and others, would suggest would be to take your brown rods, wrap them in low-grit sandpaper (I've used ~200, but the coarser the better) and clip them in place using a binder clip. Voila, a 200 grit sharpmaker rod (I'd suggest using the flats, most abrasive don't do well when used on the edges) for under $10, less than $5 each for a small tin of binder's clips and a five-pack of wet-dry sandpaper in appropriate grit.
 
That's a pretty common occurrence. Factory edges are notoriously bad, and almost always, in my opinion, need re-sharpened correctly.
 
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