3 SHARPENING TIPS BEGINNERS MUST KNOW. How to sharpen a knife

what's up guys today I want to give three tips to help beginning freehand sharpeners achieve a razor-sharp knife I get questions all the time about sharpening whether it's the private message comments or email and these three tips are gonna help address some of those questions tip number one angles don't matter okay angles do matter but it's not how you think ideally we want to try and maintain the angle that came stock with the knife all we need to do is set the knife on the stone and raise it up until it looks like we have matched the stock angle on the stone so we just want to raise the knife up just until this edge here touches the stone and that's our angle don't overthink this it doesn't matter if it's one degree off or another just try the best you can and match that angle as long as we're not at one end of the spectrum or the other end of the spectrum but we're somewhere in the middle that's all we need to worry about the trick is whatever angle we choose we need to maintain that angle throughout our sharpening process so we're just maintaining the angle that we've chosen has we're sharpening tip number two [Music] the most important thing that we need to be aware of when sharpening knives is to make sure that we apex our edge so what does completely APEC seen an edge mean that means that we take this side of the blade and we take this side of the blade and we make sure that they come to an exact point in the middle we don't want to round it off point in the middle we don't want a flat point in the middle but we want to make sure that both sides of those blades touch each other and come to a point in the middle so how do we know when we fully apex their edge one way is to simply feel if we formed a burr along our edge what exactly is a bird well that's a very good question this is a burr you see this piece of metal at the very edge of the sax you can feel this by simply taking your finger and moving it up one side you can take your finger and move it along the other side now sometimes the burr will hold to one side I can't feel the Bur on this side but I can feel it when I run my finger this way so another way that we can check our blade and make sure that we fully apex and formed a burr is to simply take it into some direct sunlight or get a bright flashlight and shine it right on the very edge of our blade here now I can see it's not gonna come across the camera but I can see right here at the tip I've not fully apex and what you're looking for is you're looking for a reflection if light reflects off of this very edge here then you have a fully apex and you need to go back to the stone now another really simple and probably the easiest way to check whether or not you fully apex or formed a burr is to just take it right to the straw off of your courses stone we can go right from a 220 grit stone clean our blade off get all that 220 grit off of there and take it right to a straw now if our blade is not sharp from our 220 or 400 after we've struct if it's not sharp enough to shave with then you're not gonna get a sharp knife progressing farther along the grits we need to go back to that low grit stone that 220 grit stone and work it until we fully apex our edge and at that point we can move one and progress through our grits after we've achieved a sharp knife one elbow is cristo tip number three so tip number three is to always sharpen backwards on the stone we've all seen people who sharpen back and forth like this I do it myself but what that involves is a lot of muscle memory sharpening has a lot to do with muscle memory and how well you can maintain an angle throughout your sharpening now it's easy to maintain an angle going backwards and to not overshoot our angle what I mean by that is if we mess up pull and towards us like this and our angle our knife angle changes and we lift the blade up as we're coming towards us we'll actually dig into the stone kind of like that right there and when we do that that means that we got to start over again so if we always sharpen backwards we'll never run into that problem it's much easier to maintain an angle if we pull the blade backwards on the stone bonus strop into okay so when we're dropping our blade one thing that we want to do is we want to strop at slightly less of an angle meaning that if we sharpen at this angle here we actually want to bring their angle down just a little bit apply light to moderate pressure and then we can strut now the reason we want to do that is because our strop is actually made out of soft material the leather actually conforms to the very edge of our blade now if we were to strop at a steeper angle than what we sharpened the leather could actually conform too much and round off our edge so strapping a slightly less of an angle than what we sharpened that allows the leather to conform to our edge without rounding it off alright guys that's it three tips to help beginning sharpeners achieve a sharp knife now remember this video is does not cover all the aspects of sharpening we could spend hours covering every single aspect of each of these topics and maybe that's a topic for future videos but remember all this video is forged to help people new to sharpening and achieve a sharp knife so remember if you like this video please like it please subscribe and let me know what your thoughts are in the comments if you have a question pertaining to any of these subjects ask me I'll do my best to answer if you ask me a question and I don't answer its most likely because I didn't get the notification YouTube is being really strange with its notifications lately and I haven't been getting comments or notifications that anybody has even commented until like weeks later so if you leave a comment and I don't answer don't take it personally it's just because I didn't see your comment alright guys I hope these three tips helped let me know what you think in the comments don't forget to like the video please subscribe thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 3,470,654

Keywords: sharp knife, how to sharpen a knife, sharpen knife, knife, sharp, knife sharpening, knife sharpening with stone, whetstone, sharpening stone, how to sharpen a knife razor sharp, how do i sharpen a knife to razor sharp, other way to sharpen a knife, knife sharpening easy, knife sharpening near me, strop, knife strop, scary sharp, scary sharp knife, knife sharpening system, knife sharpener, polishing a rusty knife, knives pluse strop

Id: n9_sND3P_F4

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017