What Did You Sharpen Today?

Father & Son Traditional Sharpening said:
They look pretty good to my eyes, perfection in edge geometry is seldom achieved and good enough is often much more than enough (assuming the apex is well formed and deburred along with acute geometry).
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Took a better photo this morning, the poor lighting in the original made the edges look kinda crappy. I set a "relief" bevel at 10-13ish degrees per side and then put an edge bevel on at 17-18ish dps. I only finish the relief bevel up to 400 grit, though it's with an Atoma plate so the scratch pattern is still pretty deep. Over time I may refine it down a bit, but I see no reason personally to spend time polishing that part of the bevel.
 
I've sharpened more expensive knives, but for some reason I've never been so nervous. I guess because it just came so perfect, except for the edge, which was decidedly meh. It scored 250 BESS and was sharpened at 20° on one side and 25° on the other. A bit disappointing, tbh, but the truth is that it doesn't matter because I'm always going to put my own edge on a new knife. Hard to tell from the pics, but it's hollow ground and decently thin bte at 12.5 thousandths (center). A bit thicker at the heel and tip.

Took it to 16 dps using my usual Tormek protocol, and also per usual, stropped on the WS KO with leather belts. Not my best work, but my hands were shaking a little. 😂



Before sharpening:



 
Spyderco Street Beat - reprofiled on my Tormek T-8 with the standard grindstone wheel to 12 degrees per side V-grind edge bevel. Finished and micro-beveled at 220 grit for deburring and to bring out hair-popping sharpness with super aggressive slicing edge with long-lasting longevity.

Now this is one very nasty self-defense tool which packs quite the punch for how light-as-a-feather this feels in hand and carries. Well done, Spyderco, what an incredible value at $120 street-price AND you get a very well done injection molded sheath with it.


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Spyderco SPY27 Mule :
Did a 60 grit grind on my wet stone grinder ..
Then put it to the rope .. ( 31 March 23 )

Only ( only ? ) eleven hundred and fifty slices for a fail .
That was yesterday .. Today I did a 80 grit grind on it .. Hmmm , how will it perform @ 80 grit ?
These super steels . seem kind of super !
 
I got a new small fixed blade for general edc and skinning game. It’s a Casström small safari hunter in 14C28N. That’s probably my favorite non powder metallurgy steel.
I used my vitrified diamond water stones. 400, 1000 and 3000. After that I went to leather strops with 4-6 micron and 1 micron diamond paste/spray. Finishing touches were with white compound.
I saw under my cheap magnifying glass that I didn’t reach the apex all the way with my 3000 stone for a portion of the belly on one side. I couldn’t be bothered to go back to the stone though. Maybe when I sharpen it next time. Result was pretty good nonetheless.


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Spent most of the day reading every post on this thread. As a new guy here on the forum I’m excited to see your guys thoughts, your work and gather knowledge in my own world of sharpening. You guys do some nice work and I’m glad I found ya. Can’t wait to post some of my own work. (Tippin my hat)
 
I stropped the following earlier this evening:

VG10 steak knife set of 4
Mini Santoku
8" Chef's Knife
4.5" Paring Knife
Civivi Backlash
SAK Super Tinker
Spyderco Delica 4

Fun times in the workshop.
 
New one for me yesterday. I picked up a Vosteed Grind, which is one of the few folding knives I've seen with a Scandi grind. You can get them with a zero grind or with a microbevel. I went with the zero because ... hello ... I bought it for the grind.



Of course one of the beauties of a Scandi is that the wide bevel essentially acts like an angle guide. They're laborious to sharpen, because you have to remove material from the whole bevel to apex the edge, but it basically requires no skill ... which is good for me as a free-hand sharpener. :p

Or at least that's the theory. As I soon discovered, the theory collapses if the bevel isn't perfectly flat from the factory, and with my copy of the Grind, it was not. I should preface this by saying that the knife was sharp from the factory (130 BESS), and easily stropped down to 90 BESS. After cutting a little cardboard, however, the score went up to 185 and it would not strop back to the excellent initial scores. Hmm.

Well, thought I, this would be a great time to experience Scandi sharpening! The knife was almost very sharp, so it shouldn't take a ton of effort to restore its hair-popping form. And that's when things went off the rails. My first thought was to start very conservatively using a Supersharp 3000 grit diamond plate. It immediately became apparent that the factory bevel wasn't perfectly flat, and worse, there was a good 1" section at the belly that had a very slight convex to it. That's a huge problem if the intention is to maintain a zero grind. Instead of having to remove maybe a micron or two of material, now you're looking at removing (guessing) 10-20x as much material to apex that section of the bevel.

Long story less long -- I ditched the 3000 plate and went to the Atoma 140, followed by many additional stones. Eventually I established a reasonably proper Scandi bevel ... and then said the hell with it and put a 15 dps microbevel on it. I suspect that the factory burned the portion of the edge that was convexed, and removing enough material to get rid of that with a zero edge just wasn't going to happen in this lifetime.

I should have taken pics along the way, but I didn't. Here's the final result:

 
Finally decided to go ahead and reprofile this MagnaCut Sebenza. I do like my CRKs in S45VN, but MagnaCut definitely sharpens up more easily. Both good steels, but I did sharpen this MagnaCut one at the same time as an S45VN one and there was a notable difference. MagnaCut continues to be a favorite steel to sharpen.

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Wandering_About said:
Finally decided to go ahead and reprofile this MagnaCut Sebenza. I do like my CRKs in S45VN, but MagnaCut definitely sharpens up more easily. Both good steels, but I did sharpen this MagnaCut one at the same time as an S45VN one and there was a notable difference. MagnaCut continues to be a favorite steel to sharpen.
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You mean easier to sharpen in terms of material removal? Or deburring? Or both?
 
stonemedusa6264 said:
I tried putting a mirror finish on a mora once...
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I just don't have the patience to do a mirror. In this case I wasn't going for one. It just seemed like, given the amount of time I spent establishing the bevel on the course stone, I might as well do some quick work with the finer stones to clean it up a bit.
 
Blade Lab said:
You mean easier to sharpen in terms of material removal? Or deburring? Or both?
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MagnaCut works very similar to S35VN to me when reprofiling. And deburrs very well. S45VN takes a touch longer while reprofiling. It deburrs fine, just not as well as MagnaCut in my experience. These aren't huge differences, but I feel they are noticeable.

My experience to S45VN is limited to CRK, so other knives and heat treatments may act a bit differently. I have MagnaCut at a range of hardness from several makers and it's fairly consistent in behavior, far as I can tell.
 
Spyderco Para 3 Light Weight in BD1N steel. Reprofiled to 12 DPS V-Grind edge at the straight portion of the edge and tapers seamlessly up to around 17 DPS at the tip for added strength and impact resistance.

This can be seen as the bevel narrowing as it approaches the tip along the belly, had this been ground at 12 DPS to the tip you would see a very even bevel width along the entire edge length. This gains you cutting ability where it's much needed (nearest the handle) and raw strength at the part of the knife which is most susceptible to taking damage (tip).

I use my Tormek T-8 exclusively for reprofiling all knives because of it's ease of dialing in consistent angles and it is water cooled to preserve the heat treat of the edge all the way to the apex. This is 220 grit edge, finished and de-burred by increasing the edge angle one degree to apply micro bevel. The result : shaving sharpness all the way to the tip which retains high slicing aggression/edge retention.

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My Wenger EvoWood got some love today on my Leading Edge sharpening system at 15dps.

I needed to do some stone comparison research today for Gritomatic between various stone types - obviously using the Poltava CBN stones on this fairly basic steel would normally be a complete overkill but it was mainly for stone progression research. I had to test about 10 different medium grit stones (various manufacturers) before I decided to start fresh again and go through to the Poltava stone progression also.

I did not add all the photos of the other stones, that was just some earlier research today on using a fairly basic stainless steel. After I was done, just for the heck of it I wanted to polish up the edge all the way.

Progression:

Poltava CBN metallic stones 120 through to 15k.
Suehiro Gokumyo 10k, 15k & 20k.
Lastly - Stroppy Stuff diamond compound on kangaroo leather 4 to 0.25 micron.

The sharpener:

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Some Edge microscope pics:

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