3 Different Ways to Sharpen Serrations

okay hey guys good morning this is cliff uh curry custom cutlery uh as promised i think we're gonna try and go ahead and start our weekly sunday morning series um hoping to keep this going and they should extend out and become more detailed as we go through just kind of a process of starting you got to start somewhere so for the first video of the the weekly show i thought we'd just go ahead and take a look at serrations and we'll take a look at serrations three different ways uh we'll start you know just we'll just discuss how to do it by hand hand file sandpaper dowel and then we have a manual method that's inexpensive using a diamond drill bit in a dremel it works fine or a custom diamond wheel with a with a profile that matches the profile depth of the scallop and we'll talk about that more the critical part is is once you get the scallops in is how you de-bore it and we'll go through all that just after the break i'll go ahead and get set up and i'll be back in just a minute thanks okay so first of the tools we're going to look at is maybe something that people already have in their kit or have readily available to them this would be a it's not a steel it's a diamond rod and a medium coarse i'd have to say it's got to be about two to four hundred grit uh maybe four to six hundred uh pretty coarse but nice long straight it's got a good radius and that radius is going to allow us to match the uh scallops that are already on the serrated blade each blades are going to be different if you got a bigger blade you're naturally going to need a bigger uh you know circumference of your circle but the main idea is that you can match the bevel and just walk right up it in a smooth manner and follow the existing serrations inspecting as long as you're holding the same angle and you're pretty firm that's one of the things that i try to talk about a lot for sharpening and for serrations especially is if you want a consistent result you got to brace yourself in some way or form so that you're consistent as well consistent with your angle or consistent with your motion and your pressure and that way you'll get even bevels or even yeah tips bevels anything that you're trying to do i you know not recommended but if you have to if you don't have any other method available and especially for some different sizes there's some different size diamond files and things like that round files triangle files those are really good for spyderco serrations and other things the smaller the smaller type serrations that may be a little different if you have the different hand files that's one great option that's available to you all right let's get on to the more serious stuff next is the first method that i found that really worked well for me it was also budget friendly uh diamond dremel bit medium coarseness about 80 grit they're often used by dog groomers they also work really good for serrations uh the jumbo size large size the radius of the bit is just about the right size to put a really nice scallop into your blade so like we were saying just in the last segment uh one of the keys to get good results is proper anchoring you can't just hold this here and and like free hand it and and expect it to get any sort of decent result i like to first i like to anchor my hand and anchor the knife so i will hold the knife and i'll hold the handle and my handle and my hand is firmly on the bench and then the second thing i'll do is i'll bring in and this is going to be a pivot sort of situation and i'm holding and squeezing and so i'm just moving up and down this one's going to move straight up and down one two and then this one's going to move one two and if you do it right uh you'll get a real consistent action and it's uh pretty easy just to watch what you're doing here you gotta hold it in the light so you can see the reflection of the bevel as well [Music] and i'll zoom in so you can uh see a little closer that method okay hopefully that's in focus and just really quick again so you can get an idea i'm holding it at the right angle i brace this with my other hand [Music] so and we'll it'll have a big burr on the back side we'll have to remove that that's the actually the critical part but you can get some pretty decent scallops going that way does it look like it came from the factory not quite but you can get some decent points especially if they're completely sanded down um the main thing you got to watch with the bit is that the bit is rotating to the side so it naturally wants to jump out of the scallop as you're pushing down into it you just have to be really firm and anchored and do a nice motion second best way we're gonna go all the all the methods have the same thing in common they put a burr up on the back side and we'll talk more about you know just sharpening from the backside if that's possible and how you can get away with it uh but for these methods we're talking about really just grinding through and making new scallops or refreshing the scallops and that's always going to move the bird to the back side and you can almost see it in the light and then what we'll do is we'll discuss several different ways to finish using the scotch brite wheel etc before we do that i'm going to show you the final the third and final thing which will be this machine right here let me go ahead and just position it be right back okay this is easily my favorite way to sharpen serrations and it's easy to understand why the wheel i've got it rotating away so i'm going to be holding this way uh you could have it rotating forward and flip this over and put the serrations underneath you can even put them on a small table i find that i can brace the knife with my hand right here and i can just go one two three and just walk right down the blade so the wheel's spinning up and away you can see it's actually some of the coating is starting to come off i don't love the 400 grit i think a 200 grit wheel would be better this is a half inch wide by six inch radius wheel sorry six inch diameter and it's a half inch wide the half inch wide will actually make closer to a quarter inch serration because you're not going a full 180 degrees around you're actually only doing that much of the serration if that makes sense so a half inch wide wheel will make a quarter inch wide serration give or take you can use it you know a fit size if you need the bigger size you're going to need a different size wheel this is the most common for your standard victorinox and many of the ones you see in commercial kitchens so let's take a look at if it'll focus they're a little sloppy they're a little all over the place i'm going to try and straighten them out and clean them up with with one shot honestly i don't know why i can't get it to focus but let's just make it happen so i'm going to turn on the machine it's just a motor with an adapter spinning the wheel we're running at under a thousand rpms to avoid a heat buildup and i'm gonna go ahead and just go right down the whole blade straighten up some of the stuff we did from the previous two methods come into the third now we're getting into the part we haven't done before again with the positioning and the stabilization i'm holding i got my my arm you can't see it but my arm is locked against my side and there's no loosey-goosey stuff going on it's actually very stable and i'm locked right into position it naturally wants to fall right down into the valley of the scallop it doesn't try and buck or jump out i think that's the biggest advantage is the consistency you get just because of that so we actually have real scallops going all the way from the top to the bottom and a burr formed all the way from the top to the bottom i'm gonna go ahead and set the machine back a little bit the camera back and we'll see if we can't get a little better focus okay we're repositioned here we we are repositioned over here um this would be my preferred first step these days and that's a scotch brite wheel it's going to do two things it's going to without rolling it over which uh the softer buffing pads and things like to right now the bird that's on here is very stiff it's almost just a deformation of the metal what we need to do is i would like to soften that up i want to remove any uh grind marks from the other step and this will basically prep or prepare us to remove the final bur once it's softened up and loosened up and we get a satin polish so this will do that in one step you could also use a scotch brite belt as well and there's a million different ways to do this there were all dozens at least i'm just going to show you a couple different give you an idea some of this is the fun of it is actually doing the experimenting and figuring out what works for you always safety first this machine is reversed the motor is going that way and i want you to make sure that you understand that that i'm setting this on top and we're moving away this way i always have things moving away from me uh so there's no danger that way the correct way to actually keep this machine really safe would be to have a protective shield over the front so there's no way to jam this in and have it shoot up at you you don't need this section this is the section up here where you want to be working all the rest could be enclosed for safety um there there's my safety sally for the day okay okay so we're moving we're moving that direction and i'm not sure i'm actually going to try and reposition you i want to get over the top so you can see this okay hopefully i'll do it this doesn't take but a second it's just a couple quick swipes and then i tend to just lightly touch it at 45 and let it roll right down through and you can actually see a lot of the metal bits flaking off right there hit it one more time from the back check it it should be extra spiky feeling and if you've done good there there might not be too many extra pieces there's just a couple little flakes hanging on at that point and that is literally all you gotta do um let me see if i can just do it without doing a cut then you come on over here pull out your this is a leather belt i've actually had this leather belt probably six years at this point it's just about wore out put a little compound on it it's going down the blade is going to be going down and i'll just the same sort of thing basically i'm just going to come in and just lightly let the edge knock that burr off i see a little bit of loose material come up and that there's no loose material it's extra toothy it's got its points back on it for the life of me i don't know why we can't oh there we go seriously so there's a little bit but you see it just walked right off there so you could do that a couple times extra toothy let's see how uh let's see how it slices let's see and this is live this isn't uh premeditated or anything like that if it doesn't work i'll just cut and do it again let's see what we got so that is that's just from the scotch brite wheel and then just a light deburring on the leather and i can see a little bit more that needs to come off right here [Music] i'm coming in if you're watching you're coming at the belt i'm coming 45 degrees this way and 45 degrees this way on the bevel side and it's a very light pass and then this one's almost vertical almost straight up and down on the back side and with a with a little uh finagling you can get this to really almost push cut right through okay well that's pretty cool um a lot of the guys will talk about how they do serrations this is taking it when it's down and i call them ripples or because we have the ocean here a lot of wave metaphors but if you have just ripples left and they've actually sanded it down to almost nothing you have to use something that can restore the serrations and put the scallops back in if you have a sharp knife and it has points like this and you're sharpening it on a repeat basis one of the things you can do is is hit it with something mildly aggressive not too bad let me see if i got a belt here that's a little too fine i mean you could go with an a100 and the a45 um the cubatron belts are great for that really heavy-duty material removal step when you need that in life but they also leave pretty gnarly scratches uh on the backside um and so if you need to it's the same thing applies hopefully you'll be able to see this people get asked a lot just how do you down in dirty serrations without really screwing them up and if you're gentle about it the scallop side the side that has the actual bevel in the serration that's the side you want to hold it about 45 degrees and about 45 degrees to the belt and then when you come in at it you don't go edge leading ever of course and then you just let you just let it kind of bump down and you'll feel you'll feel a little burr come up on the back side and then you can slightly brush that off and then if you want to you can come again 45 degrees but instead of going instead of going tip to back you can go i'm sorry from back to tip you can go tip to back you can go right here and go back to tip same thing just walk walk it off if you do that four or five times you'll notice that the serrations are getting a little bit less pointy but they're going to get less pointy just from their everyday use in a commercial kitchen anyways if that's that situation it's going to work out just fine at this point it's probably see it's not quite slicing as clean but it's definitely got the bite and the slice they're gonna they're gonna be just happy with that and if you wanted to you could go back at that point put the leather belt back on hopefully this is coming up on camera [Music] that's the power of the leather belt we just got a little bit of blue compound on there i've been really experimenting a lot with a leather belt on my truck and using a three or six micron diamond spray so there's no residue and no gunk you have to wipe off and get really good results really happy so there we are we're right back to being able to call that a winner and so these are different ways you can pull put the serrations back on there and if it's not too bad you can lightly hit it from the back side and when i when i do say lightly hit with the sandpaper from the back side which is really the most down and dirty way you can do it if i hold this sideways and i'm going to just check behind the camera to make sure that you can see that you can let me bring us in a little closer so if you are just going to hit it from the backside you don't want to hit it at a steep angle you want to almost match the flat and just a couple degrees out from the belt this is leather hopefully you guys get the idea of here here's a real belt so you know what we're talking about exactly all right so we got a real belt on there you come in you're going to just sharpen the serration by pulling the burr from the back to the front and all you have to do is you just have to hit it hit it on this belt but if you look from the side you tip it up or sorry out just slightly and walk it along and you'll feel it bring that tooth and those spikes right back up i call it playing the violin because it reminds me or the fiddle because it reminds me of that when you're doing this i always like to go at the belt to go from here and go in if you try and pull back you're actually pulling against the belt and you're pulling it kind of off the machine and the machine doesn't like that very much so you can go tip to back and then from this side you go back to tip but there i am holding it out at that 45 degrees again and that you're hitting the scallop side hopefully that'll give you guys some stuff to work on and play around with hopefully this video is entertaining and useful for everybody i'm having fun with the idea of making these videos every week we'll cover some different topics i've got a bunch of different things lined up and got i was one i've always wondered what this would look like under a microscope we could take just a quick look at the chef's choice i know everybody wants to talk about edge leading and edge trailing different sharpening methods horizontal vertical and maybe we'll take a look at steels again and take a look at what actually happens when you're stealing we can send out some sample knives to different people they could steal it and we could send them back in and then anonymously we could look at the results and compare and actually see uh you know realistically what's happening when we do that anyways that's it for today you guys it was just a quick one i wanted to share this with you this is serrations two different ways you can do it we do have the diamond bits on our website shop.currycustomcutlery.com if you want to do the easy the in the inexpensive way i'm not offering these machines for sale mostly because i don't want to have to deal with the you know it's a diy thing i can sell the parts and offer guidance on how to build the machines and give tutorials but i really don't want to get into the business of building machines at this time i know some people are upset about that this machine is really simple to put together you got a motor mounted to a board the control panel is on the back on off switch and then you just got a a flange and a spacer the spacer is there to take up the difference between the motor and the diameter inside the wheel took me maybe 30 minutes to put this machine together cost of the wheel was i think just under 100 jade jadecarver.com is the place to get the wheel and the motors you can get from amazon and there's a bunch of different ones uh try and find the least expensive one you can find because the prices of everything are going up all right you guys i really appreciate you hanging with me and hope you enjoyed the video if you do do all the things they always ask you to do please and i appreciate it i'll see you guys next week have a great day aloha [Music] you

Channel: Curry Custom Cutlery

Views: 12,082

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Id: 9PpTg66U190

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022