How To Sharpen A Knife/ Carving Tools

today's video is going to be about sharpening our carving tools that's what we're going to be talking about and doing so we're going to learn how to sharpen them proper and keep them tuned up keep them in peak performance so uh the reason why we're making this video is largely because i wish somebody 30 years ago had taken the time to explain this to me and it would have saved a lot of painful trial and error mostly error so anyways let's go ahead and jump right into it so i think a good place to start this discussion is to talk about mistakes that we all make so let's do that mistake number one that we all make is we kind of think that sharpening is one thing and sharpening is not one thing it's a few stages that are easy to understand you just have to take time to to uh to explain what they are in your mind or with someone in this video we're going to take the time to explain the the steps and so we better understand them so so that's that's that's mistake number one thinking that it's all one thing it's not one thing it's a few different steps another mistake that we make is we think we need to get our tools sharp so we go get a sharpening stone that's a mistake because a sharpening stone is not actually for sharpening it's for shaping it should be called a shaping stone that's something that no one ever told me i didn't learn that until i started to make tools on my own and that's that's what really changed my life i used to have this anxiety about about sharpening but once i started to make tools on my own and i could take a tool from just a rough piece of metal all the way through the hardening and tempering to the fine honed edge that's when i really started to understand the concept of uh of how to get it sharp and so yeah that's that's that's mistake number two is getting a sharpening stone so don't don't do that sharpening stones have a place in the woodworking world but not for this application anyways so so uh let me think here let's let's let's let's talk let's start with step number one step number one is is shaping so how we're going to do our shaping we're not going to use a sharpening stone we're going to use sandpaper now we have some 320 right here and this is just regular old craftsman we got it from lowe's i've never actually used this brand i don't really like this brand but we're going to use it today to show that you can be successful just by going to the hardware store and getting things that every one of us has access to so uh we can all go to hardware stores and we can all get sandpaper so this is what we're gonna do our shaping with and this is what we're gonna finish the process out and do our actually sharpening with the sharpening comes from the strop and the compound it doesn't come from the sharpening stone or the sandpaper the sandpaper does the shaping the strop does the honing the final edge so let's discuss that for a moment so let me tell a random story here a sequence of words that hopefully somewhere through this will help you understand uh what i'm trying to explain so when you start everyone pursues it from this standpoint they they think okay i'm going to sharpen this tool so they get them a sharpened stone and or they get them sandpaper and they go to sharpen and they think okay i'll spend a lot of time because i want this to really be sharp if i spend a small amount of time it will be a little bit sharp if i spend a large amount of time it will be largely sharp that's not really how it works like if you're doing something and you look like you're doing it it doesn't matter how long you spend looking like you're doing it if you don't physically microscopically understand what you're doing then it doesn't matter how long you spend doing it because you're never going to accomplish what needs to be done if you're not actually doing what needs to be done and so that's why i'm going to tell this story okay so how many of you guys have heard i'm sure a lot i'll answer my own question there i'm sure a lot of you guys have heard uh someone say or you yourself say or think that yeah man it takes my knife it takes a really good edge but it just won't hold that edge it won't hold it and then we generically write it off as they don't make steel like they used to and in some situations that's true but almost no situation is that true it's nice to blame it on the product the knife but in reality it's our own misunderstanding and so so let me elaborate on that further so what's happening is the reason why it takes an edge and doesn't hold it it's because of this and i'm telling this story so it can help you better understand what i'm going to try to explain in these different steps that we're going to be taking okay back to takes an edge but won't hold it so what happens is everyone me everyone takes their knife and they get them a piece of sandpaper or a sharpening stone and they commence to rubbing back and forth and then what happens is they don't understand this so let's let's let's let's think about it a little bit like like like more technical so the top surface of that abrasive uh whatever you're using sandpaper or a sharpening stone if you were to take that sharpening stone you were to cut it in half and then you were to like put it up and look at it on a microscope you would see that the top of that abrasive surface the sandpaper or the sharpening stone is it it's bumpy it's not straight it's not flat it's bumpy and that's what actually removes the material it has to be that way it's an abrasive surface so those little grains of sand stick up or grit whatever and that's what causes them to actually grab the metal and remove it allowing you to shape that edge but what happens is when you rub your knife back and forth on there back and forth on there it ends up mimicking those that it matches the top surface of that sandpaper or that stove or that stone and what that does is that puts a microfine serrated edge on your on your knife there's a term for that see that's that's called the burr the bur is what you're raising so that's that's that burr you raise that burr or that wire edge here everyone talks about this this uh mysterious bird but i'm not sure everyone understands exactly what that is anyway so when you match your your knife blade back and forth on that sharpened stone what it's doing is it's raising that bird it's raising these points and it puts a microfine serrated edge on your knife and when when those points stand up like that really proud you take that knife edge and you put on your thumb and you think wow and you feel those points digging into your thumb and you think that knife is really sharp because you can feel those points just digging in then you go to carve it immediately loses its edge and you think well it just it took an edge but it just don't hold very long but that's not true what happened was is you raised that burr accidentally without knowing what was happening those those microfine serrations those points and those points standing alone up there are very weak they're not strong at all and when you went to put it into a piece of wood to cut all of those points just bent over immediately because they were standing alone and they they didn't have any strength like that and so so they bent over immediately and you lost your performance on the first cut and then you wrote it off as the product is faulty not your ability and so very tempting but often not true it's not the product it's your ability and your lack of understanding okay so what you're trying to do in sharpening is to raise that bur to resharp to reshape the bevel and to raise that bur to get those points to stand up they're really really high and and so when you get those points to stand up that's not the end that's the beginning of phase three is what that is so phase one in sharpening is to shape the edge phase two is to raise the bur and phase three step three is the honing process okay so when you get that bur to stand up those points when you get that bird to stand up you're not done what you have to do is you have to take this strap and this strap it it when it has a microfine abrasive compound on it it's no more than a piece of leather glued to a board some of you will know what it is and some of you won't know so that's why i'm going to have to explain it's just a board with leather glued on it and you put a compound on i'll explain the strap and where to get it later anyways back to how the strap works so you have your knife edge and you have these points raised up the burr is raised now you have to knock that burr off and you knock that burr off with this drop and so this side here this side here this side here pushing away and what that does is just like bending a piece of wire in half a fatigue break it it pushes the bird to this side of the edge and then it pushes the bird to that side of the edge until eventually it breaks those points off but it doesn't bend them back into themselves it removes those those top weak points and and your and your knife doesn't look like that anymore it ends up looking like this like one stable really really self-supporting structural just microfine honed edge continuously unbroken no weak points sticking up and that's what the strop does and so that is i would wager is the missing link to all of your past flailed attempts of uh of of sharpening so that was a painful description but i think that will help you follow along when we're actually beginning to put uh steel to our abrasive surface and and and get the edge it'll help you understand what we're doing so let's go ahead and put some cutting edges to an abrasive surface and you can track along and understand better now that i have painfully described that story to you let's go ahead and do that okay so where where we're going to start here is uh this this edge has a long ways to go there's still some flat spots on the end because it was just roughed out now what we're going to use to do that with is this is a six inch random orbit now that's not the tool for the job because it randomly orbits and that's not what you want but you'll see how we use it and able to become effective with this tool we let it run true until it's just spinning exactly true and there's a bit of magic in that too because when you're sharpening with some sort of electric tool you don't want to put a lot of pressure if you put a lot of pressure you generate a lot of heat and that is where you go wrong is generating heat because that can change your temper you don't want to generate heat and so with this random orbit if we don't put any pressure it runs true but if we start to put too much pressure it reminds us to stop putting that much pressure and it will start to random orbit as soon as it starts to random over we stop so so anyways i'm going to use this with a piece of 220 and this has a foam pad which doesn't generate any heat so no heat's going to be generated here so i'm going to use this to rough out the outside edge let me go ahead and start on that [Music] [Applause] okay so what we are doing right now is step one that is shaping so we have finished the shaping with that 220 on that random orbit and that's what gave us that nice shape so we are properly shaped now so the next step is to actually start raising the bur that's going to be step number two raise the bur because we've already completed step number one which was shaping so now step number two raise the bur so how we're going to do that is we have some 320 piece of sandpaper and we've got this wd-40 can now this wd-40 can is what we're going to use to get the inside of that of that compound shape right there so and we're going to use the sandpaper bent over the outside of it like that now the sandpaper over the outside this wd-40 can is a huge advantage where if we were limited to a sharpening stone we would have whatever shape that sharpening stone came in which would probably be uh not conducive to matching to what to what we actually need so that would be a disadvantage okay so as we go to sharpen there's going to be debris buildup from removing it off of our tool and that's going to cause a performance loss so we can just move to a new piece of sandpaper and move to another piece of sandpaper a clean piece so on and so forth so we can always stay in that in that peak performance zone not to mention we have found this nice round that is going to match this round really really good so those are a few advantages that we have over limiting ourselves to a stone that is not really going to work well so let's go ahead and take this piece of sandpaper and start raising this burr so we are dragging the sandpaper towards us away from the tool we're dragging it away because we're trying to get that that burr to raise so we're dragging that bur out you don't want to push towards it pushing towards it is going to push the the debris the the the material that we're removing back into the cutting edge and so we're going to be damaging the cutting edge every time by pushing towards it you don't want to do that we're going to pull away from the cutting edge and this is dragging the material away and and establishing that burr now hopefully we're going to get a good enough burr to where you'll actually be able to see it on the camera so you will have the ability to see the elusive bird that everyone talks about but nobody knows what it actually is okay now we have established a good enough birth where i think you can actually see it on the camera there so you'll notice take a close look i'm going to rotate really slowly so that is the bur starting at that side and it goes all the way around and you can see it with your eye the bur all the way around to the other side all the way to the tip i'm going to go back so you can see it so that's a burr from one side to the other you can see it with your own eye so this is not a mysterious thing that we are talking about and have never seen before that is the mysterious bur you can see it with your own eyes so that was completing step two now was raising the birth so you can see the bur and how many times have you sharpened a knife or a chisel or something and let's imagine this is your sharpening edge and you go to test it and you think okay i'll test the full length of it to see if it's sharpening on the full length and and by testing the full length of it the only thing you're really showing there is your lack of confidence because that is saying that you went through the process and didn't know what was happening and so now you're going to have to test it the full length to see if it's equally as sharp up and down the whole thing but see we don't have to do that because we saw with our eyes the bur all the way around so now we're going to do step three which is honing the actual sharpening part this is this is still in the shaping phase step three is the actual sharpening where we employ the strap now the strap we're going to knock off of that burr so we've got that burr we've seen it full full uh the full radius from this side all the way to that side so we know we have properly shaped that edge all the way from one side to the other so whenever we knock it off there's no need to see if we have sharpened the full length of that cutting edge because we know we have because we see the burr physically with our eyes so there's no voodoo guesswork there so let's go ahead and jump into actually knocking that burr off and finishing the sharpening the finish honing of this tool is done with this let's do that all right so what we have is a strop i've said that a few times through this video but this is going to be a closer look some of you already know what one of these are and probably already have and one of these and that's that's good for you but some of you won't have one and this will be the first time you see one so you're about to get your mind blown so anyways so this is it's no more than a board with a piece of leather glued to it and now we all can take a board and we all can glue leather to that board and come up with a strap and that's drop will work really really good but they're like 35 bucks to buy this one this is butts is the name of this one butts if you look up amazon or woodcraft.com or something or just google butts strop that's a very silly name i'm embarrassed for saying it but uh if you look up this strop this is the one i'm recommending using because it has the nice round has a couple of flats that has this point very versatile and really good now what makes this strap good is all of those shapes but also it's because it's a very thin piece of leather glued to a really hard board now what that does is when you're sharpening this will be a magnified version of what's happening when you're honing the edge this is your cutting edge this is the strap what you don't want is it to round up like that that's an exaggeration as you're drawing your edge over because that's going to round over that edge so if you use a thick piece of leather that's what's going to happen it's going to it's going to sponge in and round over that edge you don't want that you want that to stay crisp as you drag that edge over it to keep that edge really really pointy and not rounded over and so that's why this is a good one because that piece of leather is really thin okay back to this drop good strap you need one of these and the strap is good and you can get away with just using the strop in fact a silly story is like old-timers used to use the back of their belt as a strap and that worked and you could they would even use the palm of their hand to knock this burr off and and if your hand is grizzled up and pretty tough you can use that to knock that bur off it takes a long time and it's ridiculous and so just get a straw and you're way better off so to speed up this drop process and to make it more effective you need a compound now what this compound is is it's it's a microfine like abrasive compound for lack of a better term it's sticky sand now sticky sand wouldn't work because sticky sand would be really really rough and you don't want that you need the microfine abrasive and so this is yellowstone if you look on amazon or something like that you can get some yellowstone and i'm telling you that because i like yellowstone only there's other there's flex cut there's all kinds of different sharpening compounds that would be up to you but i like yellowstone i've used them all and so i think yellowstone is the best and you remember it the park yellowstone or whatever so anyways yellowstone compound get some of that and get you a strop and before you start strapping just rub some of that compound on there's no magic it doesn't take a lot and uh this drop here i've used for years and years and years but they last forever they never really wear out so rub you some of that compound on and this is a unedited live shot of what it looks like putting compound on so put you some of that on and now we're ready to start removing this bur so let's go ahead and jump straight into that okay step three that's where we're at now we started in step one that was shaping and step two was raising the bur and step three is the actual finish honing so this is where the sharpening comes in so let's go ahead and start doing that now we're going to remove that bur that we worked so hard to get we're going to remove that bur and as we see with our eyes that bur going away we will know from point a all the way to point b this will be sharp all the way so there'll be no need to test it but we'll test it anyways if that would make you more comfortable or feel better so let's go ahead and start so we have our strop we've got it all tuned up with our compound any boy scout can do this like it doesn't take any skill at all you kind of want to you know keep match the angle of of your surface there and push away that's all you're doing is pushing away and we're going to push you'll notice that that that that wire edge was raised to this side the wire edge was raised up so we are going to push that wire edge to the other side is what we're going to do now this strap is what's going to give it that mirror finish that really really just shiny mirror finish it's going to take away that microfine abrasive i mean serrated surface now it doesn't take long we're going to do this in one take just to show you realistic what you're up against here so i'm making sure to thoroughly push that wire edge to the other side now i feel like i have it all the way over there pretty good so i'm going to switch and i'm going to bend it back this way again i'm using that nice round surface right there that comes on the strap and pulling away from me i mean away from the tool and you can see well i just knocked it off but you can see you won't be able to see on the film but i can see pieces of that wire edge i don't know if you can see that can can you see that wire edge right there can you see that at all right there's a piece of it i don't know if you'll be able to see it you probably won't uh anyways sorry about wasting that time but but you can see the wire edge coming off with your eyes and that is good that's what you're looking for so still just dragging that strap away from the cutting edge making sure to surface out the inside really really good now i'm going to go back to the other side and i don't know if you'll be able to see in this lighting but you'll see the actual cutting edge getting like mirror finish on it like it's really really shiny the sandpaper doesn't actually make it shiny it makes it all scratched up but this drop is not just removing the wire edge but it's removing the material as well and really knocking down that serrated edge and causing it even surfaced out really really durable cutting edge that can take a lot of abuse i like to finish on the inside here this is going to be the last pass i like to finish on the inside and it i don't think it really matters but i like to finish on the inside because i think that it makes that last pass to push the edge out to make the tool more aggressive anyways that's nonsense so that is a sharp tool now how you actually check a tool to see if it's sharp is not by testing to see if it shaves uh it doesn't take much of a sharp edge to shave almost any primitive edge can brutally rip hairs in half that's not how you test to see if it's shaved but that's often how people ah it's razor sharp well razor sharp is is like that's the beginning that's like that's not where you need to be you need to be way past razor sharp razor sharp is barely the intro to sharpening any primitive edge almost within reason can shave but how you actually test is by by putting it on your on your thumbnail and see if it's dragging and you can see that's not dragging as soon as i touch it it sticks there's no dragging there because it's biting in and i'm not putting any pressure i'm just putting it on there and it's it's biting immediately and i can check it from one side to the other but there's no point because we know it's sharp from one side the other because the bur we could see it with our eye from one side to the other so there's no second guess and so beans how we went about this with uh the the three steps three-step program here we we uh we weren't just like randomly doing something like does this look like what a person sharpening a knife looks like that's not what we were doing uh we were actually knowing what was happening physically on each one of those steps and uh so we we shaped the edge to the bevel we want now i didn't talk about the bevel the bevel is i'm sure like really experienced uh sharpeners are going to watch this video and say this guy doesn't know what he's talking about because he didn't describe what bevel to put on it now see that's the bevel itself is a very controversial thing there's a different bevel for a hand plane for for a beveled chisel but these are my these are my carving tools and the carving tool bevel is much different because it's a balance between actually slicing deep and splitting and removing debris removing wood so if you had watched our how to carve a spoon video you would have seen my hatchet is cutting very aggressively but it's also the bevel is steep enough to where it encourages the wood to be removed really quickly and splits back the wood in my hatch it doesn't just get stuck and there's no wasted energy in that so anyways so it's not that i am not aware of the specific bevel it's just that would take two hours to discuss just the bevel alone so i think i'm not going to do that in this video but anyways so this is a sharpened ads this is the one we forged the other day on that last video the how to forge an ads video and this is a pretty much done product i'm ready to carve a bowl with it so let's set this ads down and let's move over to uh another tool to give you another example of of how to do the same thing basically all right so this is gonna be just a real fast run through of uh how to sharpen a knife really quickly so we can throw these steps back into action really quickly and sort of refresh your memory and make sure you that you've locked down how to use it and in in a more of a of a common situation so this is my my opinel knife right here my pocket knife and we are going to sharpen that so so this is uh not very sharp at all it's it's look at that it's just slipping it's not it's not biting at all so this knife is incredibly dull it was a little snag but it's it's uselessly dull so let's go ahead and sharpen this up just real quickly we'll run through it all right we've got us a piece of 320 sandpaper the same one we use to sharpen the ads you get a lot of mileage out of this stuff you can see the fatigue right there anyways this is what we use to sharpen the edge and now we need it's a flat surface so the surface on that bandsaw is really really flat so let's raise a burr on this knife first thing we got to do i'm jumping the gun it is in such bad shape we have to reshape it so we're going to reshape again i'm just pushing away you don't want to pull like you're going to carve the sandpaper you don't want to do that you want to push away so i am pushing away and matching the angle that i think i need the bevel and that's something that does take a bit of skill is to understand that bevel i'm not i'm not talking about it much in this video but i should be but this video is going to be uh long enough as it is talking about a specific bevel and how that increases the performance of your tool will have to be a painfully boring video for another day anyways so that's looking pretty good so we have it shaped out good now i'm going to concentrate on these nice long intentional strokes here to raise a burr that's what we're trying to do now we already have step one shaping we're in step two raising the nice burr so let's see if we can see this bur with our eyes let's go over here to the light and take a look so you can see that burr and you are on the other side of the world seeing it through uh on this on this really chintzy camera phone here so so uh in real life it's way easier to see but now let's go and you can see it full length so now we know that we're going to have this knife in peak performance from one end all the way to the other let's go and hit it with the strap and knock that burr i already have compound on here from the from sharpening that adds and we're going to knock that burr off again we're just taking nice long strokes pushing away from it this happens real fast we're pushing away from it we're not acting like we're carving this drop or anything because that would be pushing or pulling that bur back into itself or cutting this drop and ruining this drop so real easy to do here is peeling away this is a live on edited cut of how to sharpen your knife here too i'll just drop it and again you can see that the sandpaper has has scratched it but the strap is actually polishing that scratch out of it bringing it back to that mirror really shiny mirror edge that mirror surface so let's go ahead and take a look at this edge and see if we're successful here we go okay so you could see again you could see the burr from one end to the other so we don't need to test it but we're going to do it anyways just to show you that it is sharp so from one end all the way through to the other it is it's snagging on my my thumbnail there and it's not slipping that's how you test it doesn't take uh any edge can shave so see that's not there's no magic to that any primitive edge so that's easily shaving let's uh just in case you guys don't believe me uh let's uh let's try this here and so look at that there that is that's my ads and that's kind of gross but any primitive edge can shave getting to the point of being able to shave is just that's just the beginning so so if you can get it to shave you've barely made it in to the category of sharpening you have to go way past that so anyways that is a quick and dirty run down let me let me uh this video is getting pretty long but i but i want to make one more point let's let's take a look at some other compound shapes on carving tools so we can uh better drive home the point of using sandpaper and its advantages so a few advantages of using sandpaper let's uh let's take a look at some other tools that that we all the time use is a north bay crooked knife a crooked knife is a really good tool so i have a few different ones here and and so you can see this one's really bent and that one's not so bent and and but to find a sharpening stone that's going to match that bin perfect is unrealistic and if you found one that would match that bin perfect as soon as you went to lose it use it within three or four strokes it would immediately lose performance and so that would be no point in doing that so how i sharpen these compound shapes is i find a shape that matches it pretty good and this is the handle to my fiskars hatchet everyone should have a fiskars hatchet they're really good and so again i just bend my piece of sandpaper over there my 320 and that matches really good and so i can follow the old three-step program shape raise and hone so that's that's the shaping right there you can see it just matches really really good that nice long flow so it would be hard to get a stone to match that and and on the other one i kind of rotate over here to the side and i follow this side profile a little bit because it's not so drastically round and see that matches that perfect so again i can just shape raise and hone right there anyways just a few more advantages of using sandpaper so that is a quick run through on how we sharpen our tools and keep them tuned up so you you know you shape it and and then and and then you raise the burr and you knock the burr off with the honing so you have the shape the raise and the hone those those are are the three steps and and so in my in our video we made about how to carve a spoon you'll see that i strop often that's how you keep them tuned up so once you get it to to this point here it will stay that way a really long time as long as you you know every 10 minutes every five minutes just pick up the strap and literally just just do it man this is a live update of what you'd have to do it doesn't take long you just go over it like this every couple of chops you know every five minutes of cutting or something and you're right back to that peak performance and that's where you need to stay when your carbon is in that peak performance so uh anyways i hope this video brought some value and i i think it will i think anybody who watches this video will be more successful in sharpening their tools because they can understand the steps and they won't just sit there for a period of time thinking i think this is what sharpening looks like it will bring them into the reality of they'll know what they're actually doing for each of those steps so hope this video brought some value sorry it was so long i did kind of feel like there was a lot more to explain here but the video would end up being 5 or 10 hours long so i'm not going to explain everything that there is but i think this is enough to kind of to get you armed to where you can approach the topic on your own and be moderately successful so i hope it brought you some value hope you enjoyed watching it and we'll see you next time

Channel: Carving A Path

Views: 41,553

Rating: 4.9078789 out of 5

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Id: XGsw0H2cDEE

Length: 36min 54sec (2214 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020