How to Sharpen a Knife | A Beginners Guide

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so today we're going to be talking about knife sharpening okay i always say it and it's so true we're only ever as sharp as a tool we use in the outdoors or the tools we use and our primary tool is going to be our knife so to that end today i'd like to take you through three options from your gold standard let's call it through to your silver and your bronze options for maintaining that edge on your uh on your bladed article or whatever it is you're using um so we're gonna start off by looking at japanese wet stones so i've got some here to talk about hopefully they're in some kind of order there we go now these have been soaking for about 10 minutes i don't really need much more than that let's have a look down here and you will see that these come in different they have different numbers okay these different numbers correlate to uh what's referred to as the grit okay and that's the the density of the material itself which is aluminium oxide and just like sandpaper the lower the number the coarser the rougher the stone is going to be on removing material from your blade okay so you kind of need to weigh up how badly damaged or how used or how worn is your blade as to how far down the stones you want to go so if i've been working my knife particularly hard for long periods of time and i haven't done this for a while and i've got the uh the luxury of being back here in main camp i'm gonna go for the 600 okay and i'm gonna work the knife on the 600 stone until i'm happy and we'll jump up to the next one okay which is the thousand i'll then work the knife on the thousand until again i'm happy with that we'll jump up to the three thousand now i'm going to stop at 3 000. you can buy stones that go right up to 10 000 but unless you're a samurai or some sort of you know mad fruit ninja it's really not doesn't have an application okay because there comes that trade-off point where your knife is so sharp that it's closing the grain behind itself when you're when you're making wooden items so something like this cooks up okay when i was finishing this off the knife i was using was about 3000 okay and it was so sharp it was closing the wood grain behind itself which was useful because this was extremely soft and uh and hard to work with um but i could have easily just done that with with uh sandpaper to close it over and hours and hours of rubbing but fortunately my knife was sharp enough to do an awful lot of the work for me so less sand papering afterwards and less finishing so that's a really good that's a great example of why keep your knife optimally sharp if i'd taken it past that 3000 mark we'd have lost it and i'd be re-sharpening the knife every two minutes where it just keeps knocking off an edge or knocking off an edge either way i'm just being too hard with it too vigorous so we'll just have a look at the technique now and i'll take you through how to sharpen the knife itself so starting off with a 600 and i'm just going to use one of our everyday mora companions that we use here in the camp for teaching this is number 15. there we go and see what what state the students have left it in periodically we get the students the students here to re-sharpen the knives sometimes more successfully than others this one doesn't feel especially sharp at all so probably going to go straight to the 600 and work up through now it's really important that i point out straight away the type of knife i'm using here okay so this is a mora companion in stainless steel which really doesn't make much odds anymore a couple of years ago or a few years back now people would would be greatly concerned saying that you could never sharpen a stainless steel knife as sharp as you could a carbon blade doesn't really matter anymore modern knife making techniques technology has come along so far that it really doesn't make any odds now you can get everything as sharp as everything else providing you the right technique now all i'm doing here is i'm just coloring in starting at the shoulder and coloring in all the way along the blade at the edge of the bevel okay what we described is the bevel so everything you see me coloring in now is what we call the bevel and that's where it ceases to be a single sheet piece of steel and it becomes the the bespoke angle at which the knife maker intended this tool to uh to the form we intended it to take okay and so this in particular is called a scandi grind or a scandinavian grind what that means is it's one single flat uh beveled edge the whole way around from the right away from the knife appearing from the handle all the way up to the tip what this means is that i'm able to clearly see the material that i am or am not removing with the stone with each stroke because of course the ink will disappear and i'll be left with nice shiny metal if i'm doing my job correctly very first thing we're going to do is we're going to lay the blade flat on the stone like this and then you're gonna take two fingers lay them at one end and two fingers at the other on the guard and just tilt the knife over then nice and steadily don't dig in too hard you don't have to push really hard for this just push the knife all the way up to the stone okay bring it back down again and start again just be really methodical in your process nice and steady and probably give it a good sort of eight strokes in one direction okay and then what i'd like you to do is move your two fingers towards the tip of the blade right up to that top corner and then move the knife over bring those other two fingers down onto the blade now that were on the guard and kind of start to push up slightly diagonally because what you need to allow for now is the curvature of the blade uh as thus so it's going to go to a slight slight diagonal angle and then the emphasis is going to be on the tip just as it goes around and flicks off the stone so you've kind of made perfect contact with that that cutting edge the whole way along on the stone it's about consistency being slow methodical then double checking each time to make sure that you've removed all of your pen mark so you've got a you've had that kind of golden that 100 contact with the stone the whole way along and of course once you've gone all the way up one way just try to use your fingertips here don't always go across the blade obviously never go with the blade just try to feel see whether you've got that edge coming and what you should be feeling there possibly feeling is that imagine this is my knife edge my fingertips you should start to feel it ever so slightly curved over to one side okay now invariably what we're going to need to do is flip the knife over and come back down towards us in the same fashion so we're driving metal off the last final piece to uh to make sure you do again in the same way that when you were going up you needed to really pin down that tip to make sure you got because it's a curved edge you get that good contact the whole way along we need to do the same in reverse now so the way i do this so place the knife down i put my thumb as a sort of pivot point about halfway across the stone and then i'm making sure that i'm holding on to the very tip of the blade the other side and as i come down the stone in this nice diagonal fashion and make sure that i'm pushing down the whole way along so as it flicks off the end of the stone i've made decent contact that's backed up by the fact that my pen has just disappeared from the outside edge so now we're going to move over to our thousand good rubberized bottom on these things something i definitely should have pointed out okay you need to make really good solid contact with whatever it is you're using whether it's half a log or whether you've got a table like this maybe at main camp i'm going to lay the knife down nice and flat and again same technique two fingers and two fingers lay that over there like that and begin to push away okay gonna go for a good sort of eight count again and you can see it's removed all of that material then we're going to move up just double check that by uh looking at the end there and again all the ink is gone and then it's a case of same as we did before we flip it over come back towards ourselves make sure you're double checking that blade at all times it's really coming along now don't be afraid to re-wet the stone from time to time okay so just put your hands in there to sprinkle on some water right so up to the 3000 now okay painted up our bevel same sketch same thing all over again um once i've completed this and i'm super happy that it's sharp enough i'll just do a quick test on the back of my arm i've got quite hairy wrists and we're just gently i'm not pushing into my own wrist really hard here i'm just going to gently look at that start to remove hair from the back of my arm i've got a nice bold bald back of my arm now that's really where i think everybody's knife should be in the outdoors that's how sharp you should maintain a blade and if it if it gets too dulled you're gonna have to go right back through the stones so you're much better off just keeping it pepped and maybe at the end every single day going through a quick process of just putting that edge back on looking after your blade that kind of leads me into technique number two option two this is your silver option this is what you do when you're out on the trail how do you maintain that blade and keep its optimal sharpness so there's two things i'm going to show you here but they're classed as one and one of them is going to be these lovely little stones they don't require any water and they don't run on oil either you just use them as is okay and they fit rather nicely and neatly or can do inside your your knife sheath this is where i carry this one for instance now because this thing is kept so utterly sharp at all times this is kind of benign for today so we're going to put it to one side we're actually going to use another student knife which i know is probably sub-optimal at the moment and that's going to be a more uh black more bushcraft black more survival whichever knife you want to to call this they're all kind of the same thing a really nice ergo grip slightly thicker steel a slightly higher shoulder so a deeper bevel than maybe the companion and in carbon which means it requires a lot more effort to keep it oiled and keep it loved and look after it otherwise you will find these start to rust quite quickly so with that in mind all i do is i probably get my mobile phone out so here's my mobile phone with this rubberized edge i'll lay that down on there and i'll put the stone on like that and i'll start off on this side okay this on the ceramic one is very much a finishing edge this is what we apply afterwards we start off on here now i'm not exactly certain of this grip but it feels to me like about a thousand maybe fifteen hundred i'm not sure would have to check the specs and then i'm gonna lay the knife down onto the stone now i've got a lot less stone here to play with so uh this is kind of a bit more of a you've got to use every last little piece of these stones and this is how i go about it so you can start off in the primary position i showed you before just driving away okay that's fine there's nothing wrong with that you just might be there a little bit longer because you haven't got as much stone and you're not making as much contact with the knife okay then just double check that again i've just had a look there and you can see how much i've removed okay because the stone's a lot smaller so a lot less i'm going to have to maybe do this in three goes or i can learn how to do it in one sweet one sweeping motion um but again it's a little bit more advanced so let's take a look at that as well so from here i'm going to push all the way up and finish off on the top just make sure this doesn't move as i said before we don't want any of it moving using every last piece of the stone okay and when i look underneath i can see i've just missed a little bit on that top edge so i'll go back and redress that with a much more specific movement so you can start to see why this is the silver option because it's a little trickier you've got to have a bit more technique weighed off um but nevertheless to maintain your blade in the field this is this is really good okay so we've taken off all of that now just double checking and this is the beauty of using the pen you can really see where you've been where you haven't okay just up there on the tip okay it's fairly uniform then all i'd do is give this another coloring and then come back down on myself so i'm doing lots of smaller sharper movements this time because i've got a much smaller knife and i'm i'm trying to keep up the same sort of speed at which i'm maintaining my blade now um but again it's one of those things it sounds a bit corny it's that classic slow is smooth and smooth is fast you'll you'll get a real feel for this uh it's not going to happen overnight you've just got to do this a few times to get a feel for what's working and what isn't so if we have a look now i've removed all of the uh pen on that side and all of the pen on this side okay bar maybe a tiny bit in this top corner this will be really rejuvenated now and have an edge back on it and all i'm going to do is swap the stone over onto its back onto this really smooth ceramic side okay same sketch lay it down and of course to finish it off as if i probably haven't got any hairs left on my forearm now i find another little spot we'll just double check that again with these more bald spots for my forearm i've got only four arm left alright there we go so that's that one done the other thing i could have done uh and that i'm gonna take you through anyway when you're out in the field is stropping because it's an easy win now if we were back at base camp we could have some ready-made strops okay this is a bit of old bed slat and all i've done is just glue down a piece of leather okay and i could use this it's a good solid surface and all i would need to do is just lay the bevel of the blade on there and drag this up like this okay this would be a nice base camp option and maybe stropping it 50 times wouldn't be uncommon maybe 50 strokes okay in every direction you're not actually really removing material but what you are doing on a microscopic level is you're standing up that wire edge you know like molecule edge on the outside that really does give you the difference sometimes between slicing through paper or taking hairs off the back of your arm and not so this is a good option however do i want to carry one of these around with me in the field possibly not so what i can do is have good quality real leather belt um i'm almost always wearing one it's just easier to have one here to hand to show you guys today so all i would do is just whip this over and under a fallen tree or log or something similar okay and make sure it's super taut now it's never going to be quite as good as the gold standard option of a solid piece of board because it's got a tiny bit of give in it we're talking negligible over time if you constantly only use the belt what could potentially happen see that give happening straight away is that you could potentially be encouraging that flat scandy grind to round itself off to more of a convex level it's going to take an awful long time probably very unlikely and all i'm doing is stropping the blade up and down on that wire edge now it's at this point that i could bring into play another really top tip you can actually go out and buy and i've got some here this really fancy paste okay and this is i mean it's written in french patawi there we go and it says uh luminosity okay so uh that's the uh that's the the stuff this stuff is made of and basically impregnated inside this paste which you would rub onto the belt like so is a uh it's like it's basically it's a stropping compound okay so when i'm drawing the knife up and down here this is actually uh tidying the blade up on a micro level again it's polishing the blade it's removing material it's helping it to stay sharp so it's doing a little bit more than just just the leather wood so that's the other real benefit of having a real leather belt not a fake leather belt real leather belt is that you can use it as your stropping option to maintain your blade when you're out on the trailer in the field so what we've got here is the lansky blade medic okay this is our bronze option the reason i've decided to push this down the scale make this our bronze option is it requires little or no skill to use whatsoever which is a bit of a pro uh but more so it's extremely aggressive on your blade edge um this is probably the sort of thing i would have been using um as a royal marine okay this would have sat in my belt kit out on tour and whatnot i'm pretty sure this is why i bought this thing um because i could just sit this down almost anywhere you could sit this on on the on the dashboard of a vehicle moving from location to location and just pull the knife straight through this heavy duty carbide edge these two these two surfaces where they come into this sharp v okay that's going to quite aggressively remove a lot of material from your knife and it's going to put an edge back on it fast you can then jump over onto the ceramic side which is the next one this is the white in fact oh look it's written on there or the white side of those you go from carbide over to ceramic and then you could finish off on this outside edge okay it also comes with this little diamond taper thing here a kitchenaid for sharpening a chef's knife it's diamond tapered as well so it's got lots of options on it it doesn't weigh especially an awful amount i can't remember how much i bought this for because it was that long ago but we'll put a link in below if you do want to go for this option as i said it requires little or no skill where where it kind of comes into its own is if you're in transit somewhere if you're going somewhere you don't have to soak it in water i mean in terms of size it doesn't take up that much more room than maybe one of these little stones but in terms of its aggressiveness and its ability to very quickly put an edge back on i don't need to have a stable platform to operate this okay i just need to hold it hold it tight enough in my hand let's just use this old knife here i probably wouldn't be using any nice knives through this thing and we'll just literally place that on there right up near the guard and begin oh to pull it through you know that feeling when some people don't like that feeling of chalk uh that kind of uh what am i trying to think of there it's like they just they start to shudder it makes me shudder pulling a knife through this thing because it's so aggressive okay so i'm just going to give it a couple of good pulls oh my word in fact you can see how much material that metal that has just been ripped off by this thing um you can see that on the end of the blade and in the housing here okay so that is really really bitten in hard and has put a very aggressive edge straight back on that knife okay and then all i've got to do is jump over to that ceramic side and pull it through again and life is golden so i'm going to give it good pulling through here okay that feels remarkably sharp okay so uh this is the no nonsense um uh no skill required and again let's attack my forearm now and just see where we've gone with that there's gonna be any hair left on my forearm by the end of this one uh we'll go over this side okay yeah again just whipping hairs off um that is incredibly efficient incredibly aggressive and quite quickly if i was to use that as my go-to every single day my knives would just disappear into next to nothing however so if you're in a military context if this is very much your survival is depending on this thing going from location to location um go with something like this they're super hardcore aggressive and you just saw there how much material got removed in the blink of an eye so there you go so that's my kind of gold silver bronze option for um maintaining an edge on a or sharpening and a tool or knife in the outdoors i'd really like to hear how you guys are actually maintaining your your knives um doesn't matter how silly it might be whether you're turning a uh a mug upside down and using the ceramic edge on a cup whether you're using a land rover window or whatever it is you're doing i'd like to hear about it so leave us some comments and let's let's have a chat i should probably point out and as a bit of a admission is that i i never really truly learned to understand how to sharpen uh tools as a royal marine commando because you know that that kind of ops driven pace you just you use the tool whatever it is to destruction then you just hand it back in or if you've lost it whatever just get me another one out the store sign it out and you go again you know or you you'd hand your whatever it is parang or your jungle tree slapper your big mod knife to the armorer who would put an edge on all of them for everyone okay this wasn't something this is something i had to learn afterwards i had to sit down and really study and go through and practice practice is key guys that's that's all this comes down to um you know the same amount of time it took me to learn it could take you to learn and you could do this with everything once you've learned this skill and you fundamentally weighed it off you could apply this to chisels to which is also anything you can put an edge on your lawnmower blades okay if you're savvy enough to take apart the lawn mower and you feel like it's not cutting that well anymore okay take the blades off same sort of techniques apply all right

Channel: Hidden Valley Bushcraft

Views: 51,162

Keywords: bushcraft basics, how to sharpen a knife, knife sharpening, sharpening stone, knife sharpener, how to sharpen a knife razor sharp, sharp knife, knives, sharpening, knife sharpening system, knife sharpening easy, how to sharpen knife, bushcraft skills, camping gear, hiking

Id: BL4h2LdsLbk

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020