User friendly knife sharpener + leather strop??

S

-sro-

Joined
Aug 1, 2009
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278
Hi all!

I am in the market for a user friendly knife sharpening system and a leather strop.

I know this is probably the 1,000,000,000 post like this but please help me out.

Thanks!
 
It only becomes user friendly when you have the knowledge of the action performed.

Do you want stones/freehand or system?
 
Edgepro Apex
Spyderco Sharpmaker
DMT Aligner

All have their pros and cons but all are excellent sharpening systems.
 
So you want something that you just touch up your knives on, or do you want a system that you can reprofile the edge and change the angle and to sharpen butter knife dull knives?

If you keep up on knives and don't let them get dull you can get away with just touching them up the majority of the time.

The strop can be as simple as a scrap piece of leather from a belt or a store that sells leather or a piece of MDF or even a piece of cardboard from the back of a legal pad. You can also buy a nice premade strop that has fancy wood and a nice piece of hard leather. The compound you put on the strop is the key, for me at least. I didn't have any luck with Sears green chromium oxide (which isn't that high quality) and I think I actually made some of my knives more dull. With today's 'super steels' which are hard and have lots of carbides, I suggest diamond spray which is harder than the carbides and effectively cuts the steel. Since getting my 1 and 0.5 micron diamond spray I have been able to just strop my knives back to scary sharp when they start to lose their great edge. This is once or twice a week on ZDP and M4 which hold an edge for a long time. I haven't had to actually sharpen a knife that gets this treatment in a long time.
 
Where...do I buy diamond spray? Does it literally have bits of diamond in it? Stupid question, I know. lol.
 
harkamus said:
Where...do I buy diamond spray? Does it literally have bits of diamond in it? Stupid question, I know. lol.
Click to expand...


Many of the sharpening supply places online carry it but it is usually small containers that contain a few grams and don't list carat weight (usually). I bought mine from hand american and you can buy 12, 18, or 22 carat in either 4 or 8 ounce bottles and is very reasonably priced. This stuff works really well for me and many others but I can't compare it to anything else. I can't imagine something working much better though. It does contain pieces of diamond but they are very small and it makes the liquid grayish colored. 1 micron is about 0.00004 inches across so it is very small and you can't feel anything when you touch it, it just feels wet. In my experience with other powders once you get to a particle size of 0.004" you can no longer feel a gritty feel when touching it. The 1 micron diamond particles are quite a bit smaller.

Head over to the Maintenance and tinkering subform for lots of information on stropping and compounds.
 
I use a Sharpmaker and a strop block that came from Knives Plus. I have an Edge Pro that rarely gets used because of the setup time and I have DMT benchstones that do get some use on certain knives, but the Sharpmaker and the strop block handle 95% of my sharpening and touchups.
 
i use a sharpmaker with ultra fine rods and a mr2blue strop loaded with hand american 1 micron spray...it works very very well for me and it is pretty user friendly...i got a brick dull crappy kitchen knife to pop hairs the other day:thumbup: with the strop most times you dont even need to break out the sharpmaker to keep your edges up:D
 
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