Knife strop questions;

I’m a user, will cut almost anything and it’s likely that just about anything will need to be cut. That said, I’m not out there like I used to be. It’s hot as hades here and we sweat. Salty sweat can really get to a blade. So rust resistance is important. But no, I don’t like a hard blade that chips. I can’t stand chips, because while it’s easy to sharpen a blade that’s gotten dull from use, it’s a pita to re-profile a blade with nicks and chips in the edge.

Ixnay the 189. Nuff said there, I’ll fugetaboudit.

M4 huh?

I’ve been carrying an ATS34 Buck Strider mini. The blade is thick, comparatively short, and I like Titanium liners and G10. Gotta have a liner lock, if not a frame lock, as I’ve been carrying them so long now I’d hurt myself with anything else. This Strider clone seems to have a much larger blade, but it’s actually only about a 1/4” longer than the Buck. (3” cutting edge) This one too has a thick blade, so it should be able to take some abuse. And it was only $16.98 shipped. I have no idea how they do it. I also don’t know if it’s 440A or C or 7Cr17Mo or what it is. It’s hardened pretty good, was not exactly easy to sharpen. It’s even got the BOS heat flame stamp on it, but it’s missing the little indention where the machine actually tests it. Go figure.

I use a cheap strop, £2 leather belt from a charity shop, Solvol Autosol or Peek or whatever metal polish you use, spread on the grainy side of the leather belt, strop away.
You can use 12 to 18inch lengths of the belt glued to a piece of timber or use it whole and hook the buckle over a hook or lever type door handle.
Recently I’ve been going for the more toothy edges as I cut Paracord quite a bit and find the tiny serrations of a toothy edge cut better. Dragging the blade across the Paracord it’s better with a toothy edge but a sharpened until shiny edge push cuts better.

EDIT………I must add that you have to be careful if you are going to strop slip joints or the SanRenMu detent locking knives, dragging the knife spine first over the strop might be enough for the blade to close, it shouldn’t because you don’t need to apply a lot of pressure when stropping but when first starting it’s tempting to push too hard and a slipjoint isn’t meant to have pressure on the spine side of the blade and stay open.

Want and yes I understand the lifting if the stone on back stroke I guess I am just frustrated because I have been stuck at this level and can’t pass to the next level of sharpness like I believe it was a youtube video of a mora fixed blade slicing through sheets of toilet paper effortlessly.

That is not an easy thing to accomplish and quite rare. The right combination of blade design, blade steel and expert sharpening techniques is a difficult combination to achieve. Very few will ever get to that level.

Can you completely and totally disassemble and reassemble your Glocks? Can you make the Glock have a 3 1/2 lbs trigger pull? Once upon a time I achieved that, wasn’t easy, and I was told very few Glock armorer’s could do it. I certainly wasn’t a Glock representative! But I had friends…

The point being, there are skills that few master, and sometimes it’s just impossible for others to duplicate what might come naturally to another individual. Cereal Killer has found a way to create an incredible edge. And he’s admitted it takes hours sometimes, with advanced techniques. Keep on keeping on and perhaps you will find yourself doing things you never dreamed possible.

I can vouch for CK’s knife skills, he elmered me a big ol honkerin’ blade…sharpest thing I own…

Oh CK, my bro in law can get those drilling well collar hardened steel plates (they use them in the well and use to lock the collar under ground in the rocks and angle the pipe over) very very

rotary slip wooley I think is what they call em

Back side is flat and hardened steel, can these be used to sharpen a knife…I need someone to teach me to keep my knives sharp…I can sharpen somewhat but not like you did

Found this

Lansky Sharpeners any good?

Im either to stubborn or to dumb to quit maybe about 1/2 &1/2 so next and hopefully last question, should I buy barbers stops off line or try 8steven88’s sugestion of just getting a. Old belt and nail it to a board, I also have some “Metall” aluminum and stainless steel polish, will that work?

I used to use the Lansky system but found it to have very limited merits.

-good for sharpening few and small knives. Longer knives require too much labour, repositioning of the knife on the clamp, angle changes towards the far ends.
-high risk of injury because the motion requires you to pass over the blade continuously. A moment of inattention and you’ll slip an cut yourself
-takes tooo long to put new profile on the edge, even with the diamond kit.
-clamping system sucks.

Took me about an hour to reprofile and sharpen 5 knives - a cleaver, santoku, and other smaller knives. That’s just not good enough!

Now I just use a belt sander/linisher and go through the grades. For kitchen stuff I find finishing with 400-600 grit to be perfect even though it won’t shave your arm. I’m never going to hand sharpen again! My advice to anyone is to get a Worksharp knife sharpener as it takes the guess-work, skill, and labour out of the equation.

The Ken Onion model looks especially appealing. Gonna have to give that one some serious thought.

My buddy has a WSKO (worksharp ken onion edition). It’s a good tool no doubt but don’t think for a second your gonna get one of those, learn to use it (cause like any sharpening technique it still requires practice) and then have any skills that transfer over to hand (or guided hand) sharpening.

Any paste that is slightly abrasive will work, even the leather on it’s own will polish the edge to some extent. If you are nailing the leather to a board make sure to fix it on the sides not the top so the blade can’t come into contact with the nail or screw heads. Gluing would be much better, contact adhesive is good as it doesn’t harden the leather and remains a bit flexible.

There are some really excellent strops available as well as diamond paste. there are also sheets of micro mesh, abrasive sheets with very fine abrasives in grades of 500, 1800, 2400, 3200, 3600, 4000, 6000, 8000, 12000 and higher. not at all expensive when you consider the price of strops and abrasive pastes Amazon has a set of nine grades size 6” x 3” for £7 and they last very well.

I have a Lansky hone system, actually several sets including the diamond and given practice and a couple of clamps and mounts it’s amazing the length of blade that you can sharpen. The single most important extra, a mount of some sort, the plastic one from Lansky is good - this allows you to concentrate on the sharpening. A close second is a black Sharpie, put a coating on the bevel to allow you to see where the hone is removing metal from the blade.

I recently bought a Lansky four rod turn box and I’ve been impressed with the way it sharpens, very good edges without a lot of effort, for my needs at the moment just the brown medium grit ceramic rods are all I need to get a working edge. The white fine ceramic rods get a good sharp edge a stropping after that and it produces a very sharp knife.
All the systems require practice and time to produce good results, there’s no short cut, take your time and get it right.

I was gonna email this to WH but I decided to post it for everyone.

The lansky turn box isnt bad per say, its cheap and easier to learn but I suggest spending a little more and getting a spyderco sharpmaker, reason being with a turn box there are no flat surfaces, if/when you’re ready to switch over to stones you cant do so with the turn box, you have to buy new equipment, with the spyderco SM you simply lay the triangle rods down on the bottom of the unit and thee you go- a flat stone. It also has points for getting smaller serrations.

For anyone wanting to start out freehand my #1 suggestion is a 4-sided diamond block (cheese greater looking thing) from harbor freight, its a surprisingly well build piece of equipment for being from HF. The thing only goes up to 4 or 600 grit so it’s very course DO NOT START OUT ON YOUR GOOD KNIVES, go out and pick up some cheap knives from the thrift shop, you will make the first ones worse before you get better.

The biggest aspect of sharpening is angle control, you have to hold the blade at a steady angle, any angle from ~10 up threw 25DPS (to 20-50 total) will give you a sharp edge as long as its properly apex’d and the burr removed, different angles are better for different steels and different tasks, you wouldnt want to sharpen your camp chopper to 20* and you wouldnt want to sharpen your paring knife to 50* but you can at first, much more important than angle is getting down to new steel, getting a proper apex and fully removing the burr. Make sure the burr fully forms on one side BEFORE flipping it, if your not bringing it to a burr EVERY TIME your not accomplishing anything but wearing steel off your blade, n omatter how much steel you remove if you dont get that apex your knife will not get sharp. Start out by getting yourself a piece of paper, fold that in half so you have a 45**, now fold that so you have a 22.5, use that to visualize how to hold the blade and go from there, a 45** angle (overall, 22.5DPS) is a good place to start, learn to hold that angle perfect and you can go from there.

More later if anyone has any questions, gotta go pull a head off a truck to have it sent out by noon today…

Note I’m busy and didnt proofread, will go over it later when I have time to revisit…

This guy has some nice strops for sale http://www.stropman.com/ You can checkout youtube as there’s quite a few reviews of his strops.

I ordered one a year or so ago from him. He has pretty good service. Of you could always make your own if you don’t want to to buy a pre-made. It’s not too difficult - basically just a strip of leather glued to a piece of wood.

I switched he’d from a Lansky to a Gatco, because of the narrow area and the risk of you fingers slipped and filet them in nice little strips and I am going to give the old belt trick glues to a 2”x4” while my premade is on its way , I s seriously have been using g a Lansky since ’93 and the Gatco since 2000 and as I stated earlier I can get them sharp enough to shave with, but scary sharp as say Benchmade, spider Co or lone wolf’s out of the box thanks for all the tips I will give all mentioned tips a try.

Cera l _ killer a couple of apologies 1 he was right I had to spend over an hour with my ceramic hone on my Gatco @22° and it got scary sharp on my Harnds Viper and Schrade 501 both with 9Cr18MoV blades they took much more work to get the same edge as my 8cr18Mov blades and #2:a BIG APOLOGIE on my part because I pre-judged him because of what some CO member accused him of , so I owe him a public. Apologie thank you for the tip and almost your input I home you will forgive me and give me and we move past this.

This is just some of my thoughts that have popped up over the years when reading the countless knife sharpening threads. This is not meant to offend anyone nor discourage anyone. It is just my opinions and experience.

To get good at it you have to practice. I don't think there is a sharpening system made yet where you can skip that step. So toughen up. Sore fingers are part of the game. As is ruining a good edge, cutting yourself, getting dirty fingers and getting let down by some magical sharpening system. Sorry. There is only one shortcut in my world. It is right at the end of this message and it is called stropping.

Get a cheap and medium sized knife from anywhere cheap. Practice on that. Change the angle to a solid 30 degree and down to a skinny 8 degree or anything in between and each time go out and try that knife. You will find that you prefer one over the other. And that is allright! You don't have to have an exact 17 degree something on you blade. Even if your favorite youtube knife hero says so. Maybe 22 fits your use a lot better.

Get a cheap and small knife. Repeat the steps. New angle. Maybe a new profile alltogether. I've changed the blade profile completely on a few knives after the tips broke off. Did the sharpening on an ordinary carborundum knife sharpening stone. The square one. One side is fine the other coarse. Takes some time but unless you chose a psycho hard steel knife to try it on then you will get it done sooner than you think. (But not as fast as you may wish)

Get a sharpening steel. Now learn how to use that. That'll keep most of your knives tip top most of the time. Dont buy a diamond one. Those are for removing material. Steel ones are for straightening the edge. If a sharpening steel does not produce a super sharp edge in 20 strokes or less you go back to the stones/abrasive paper/fancy machine and try again.

After you learn to use that sharpening steel you can keep you pocket knife scary sharp most of the time by sharpening it on just about anything. Adjustable wrench, spanner, screwdriver, a glass bottle, a shovel, the back of another knife... You name it.

Get a cheap piece of leather. Forget those expensive strops. Because if you upfcuk just once when stropping... you cut that strop halfway through before you can stop your hand... Ask me how I know! (Mine was an old leather belt where the buckle had broken... Phew. But still)

Get "something" put on that leather strop. I don't care what it is called. 790000 grit fairy dust? Fine by me. Just get something. It makes a difference. But once your knife is really sharp it will hardly need the strop. But stropping it till that last fine edge is a lot quicker than doing it any other way. I have used the carborundum paste we use to grind engine valves. The finer one. 400 or 500 grit if I recall. And dont use a whole lot of abrasive paste.. Wet the leather with some oil. Does not matter what oil it is. Then apply the paste.

I am by no means a master at sharpening knives. But all my kitchen knives are shaving sharp. My 3 dollar 2 inch pocket knife cuts 1.5" reinforced rubber steam tubes with little effort. I practiced a lot.

EDIT: Some things I forgot..

Ever wonder when it is "good enough" ? It is when you touch the blade to your fingernail at an 90 degree angle and try to gently move it sideways. If it "bites" in to your nail and does not want to move or if it scrapes the surface off it is good enough! (don't push on it, no pressure! If it is scary sharp it will cut through that nail before you even think about it.)

Many cooks use this to assess if their knives are sharp enough after a session with the sharpening steel. Why? Because if they tried the shaving then there would be hairs in the soup! (An actual cooks joke . At least it was a cook that told it to me when discussing knives and sharpening)

Best fixed blade knives are Mora knives. For the money and in any situation I've had to deal with. Can be as sharp as you like. Can take a beating. Comes with orange handle so you can find it again if it ever goes anywhere outside with you. These can be punched through a kevlar plate. I don't need anything else. About 8 usd here in Denmark.

Best daily folder is Opinell. Nothing fancy for the money but can become scary sharp on the flat side of a small rock in 1 minute flat. Comes in all sizes. Illegal to carry here in Denmark due to the lock. So I carry a 3 usd noname folder.

First off, I completely concur with every single thing Ledsmoke said. There is one point I’d like to sharpen up, if I may be so bold.

That’s not perfectly precise. “Practice Makes Perfect” is a bit of a tautology. Actually Practice Makes Permanent. Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect. First you have to work out the perfect technique, using the paper guides explained earlier, or whatever suits you, then practice that.

Okay, that’s all I can add.

There is one other thing, I must say:

And I take exception to that comment. At a minimum, it would be extremely debatable, and I believe the maxim “by their fruits ye shall know them” proves it false.

Other than that, I’d offer a tip for QC inspection: If you get a strong light behind your head, so that the light shines past your face onto your knife edge… Easier done than said… Imagine the light rays running past your eyeball onto the knife at a distance you can focus on… Now imagine the plane of the blade running such that it would look like you’re trying to slice your eyeball in two equal pieces… If you rock the blade back & forth lengthwise so the light spot moves along the cutting edge, look for flares or disturbances, which are either flat spots or rolled burr edges. This is less useful after sharpening, but in a pinch it will show you where you need to work most to fix an edge. And where your buddy used your knife to whack Romex. :open_mouth:

Thank you ALL for this awesome thread and all the excellent Knowledge!!!

Dim

If you want to whittle steel, like whittling wood with your favorite pocket knife, get yourself one of these:

It’s nothing but a Carbide bar on the edge of a small steel bar. KISS. I picked one up on a whim at the local hardware store, to see if it would make sharpening lawn mower blades less of a chore. It worked.

For a giggle, to test it, I tried whittling the edge of a double-bit axe head I was in the process of re-handling… One stroke down each side of an edge made the old head (the axe, not mine!!) dangerous to work on!!

Needless to say, I’m impressed.

Not shilling, just sharing. This is a cool tool and it is small enough to fit almost anywhere you want it, and will get any metal you can find (even bar stock, I’d wager) sharp enough to skin a deer, without a lot of work. No, it won’t likely make an edge like you guys are discussing in this thread, but it will make an edge you can use to cut things, on anything metal and flat — and that right soon.

I only paid around seven bucks, so needless to say I went back & picked up a few. One of them is the only sharpening tool in my BOB now…

Hope this helps.

Dim

Lot of guys love sharpening by hand and I can see the appeal and satisfaction in learning. It is unnecessarily labour intensive when you have powered sharpeners available though. Only learn the manual way if you like the novelty of it. I don’t think it is in any way a life skill in the modern world. If you live in a log cabin in the woods then that’s a different story. Otherwise, the most simple, ergonomic, easy to use method is a powered sander of some sort.

A clay flowerpot , turned upside down , if used like a turnbox-style sharpener will decently sharpen a knife . It might take a while , and I wouldn't suggest it for reprofiling , but it's good for quick touch-ups .

Then you strop it on some cardboard and go cut something .

No a bad price and I do have yard tools that need sharpening, And as far as practice I have alot I got my Lansky kit in ’93 and then on 2000 I upgraded to a diamond Gatco kit with a ceramic stone but I never used a stop and Cera l _ killer told me that with harder metals it takes longer I have been able to get my cheap 8cr18Mov blades scary sharp with the Gatco kit UT never my 9Cr18MoV blades so last night I spent close to an hour on. My Harnds Viper made with 9Cr18MoV and finally I got what I thought was a decent edge.but for me to try freehand on a stone ,forget it I really did a terrible job that way .