How to Sharpen a Knife with a belt grinder.(SUPER FAST)

welcome back to another video guys thanks for coming and checking this one out um i'm answering a question today that is probably the most asked question that i get and it's about knife sharpening so i've had a ton of people request a video on sharpening a knife start to finish on the belt grinder and if you guys have followed along on this channel for long enough um you know that i use the paper wheel system for pretty much all my sharpening which if you don't know what that is it's basically a round mdf wheel with grit on one side the other wheel has kind of a polishing compound on it and it's super fast and it goes on your uh bench grinder i'll put a video probably right up here of kind of my process of sharpening on that now um there is some downfalls probably to every sharpening system um but for me using that grit wheel they wear out fast especially when kind of putting on secondary bevels on fresh new knives um you know you're removing a lot of material and it just wears out fast you have to re-grit them you have to replace them and it gets kind of old so i think that a really really good thing as a knife maker or just anybody in general that wants a good sharp knife is to know how to grind and sharpen a knife with a belt grinder now today i'm using my 2x72 kmg tx grinder um and it has a vfd which you know you can adjust the speed of it and get it really slow i think that that is really important with this if you have a normal grinder that doesn't slow down i think it can probably still be done you're just going to have to pay more attention to the heat buildup than what i do with this so i think what i wanted to talk about most is you know getting that secondary bevel put on which you know your primary bevel would be that your secondary bevel would be actually the edge of the knife uh and then i guess that's the best way to explain it so getting that secondary bevel put on with the belt grinder and then polishing that edge to make it just razor sharp so that's what i'm going to talk about today my process of it and uh come along with me and i'm going to kind of do it as i go and explain it all right so i wanted to kind of explain a little bit about what you're going to need to do this um what i've been doing a lot recently is i've been putting that secondary bevel on with this belt grinder and then as soon as i've got a good good burr pulled up i go over to the paper wheel system do a final one on the grit and then a polish and that works great but for this video i really wanted to do every step of it on this belt grinder um and i struggled with it in the past because what happens is you pull that burr up with whatever grit you're using for me it's a 400 and whatever there's not a good belt to be able to really polish that burr off until i did a little bit of research and i found these leather strapping belts okay and i just got this one and i've been tinkering with it a little bit um and basically it's just a piece of leather and a belt this one's obviously a 2x72 they make them in every size you'd want i'm gonna go ahead and put a link in the description for one of these belts because i think without this there is other ways to polish that burr off but i think this is the best fastest easiest way and so far it's produced just an incredible edge so this is key again link below for one of these things go pick one up for whatever size grinder you're running but i like to use two different belts to get that secondary bevel put on so i start with 180 grit it's actually this one and that's a red label abrasive ceramic 180 grit and then a 400 grit once i have that initial secondary bevel put on and i'll even get to where it's pretty much pulled a burr up with the 180 and then i go to the 400 and kind of refine it just a little bit and then you can go right to that leather strapping belt so i'm going to go ahead this is a just a junk knife i have laying around that it was a damascus one that has a little crack in it we're gonna go ahead and just put an edge on this and show you guys my process here this edge is at roughly 25 thousandths um which is kind of a good example to show you guys kind of the speed of this um and i'm going to just kind of change the camera around put it over here show you my process and hopefully you guys can pick up a couple tips all right so we're at the belt grinder right now like i said 180 grit belt on right now um and i think it takes a little bit of practice to get this down as far as your angle and you're just going to have to get out and do it a little bit to try to figure out what angle you want to sharpen at um now i think the key to this whole thing is consistency and making sure like you can kind of see here you know get up to the grinder and feel what's comfortable before you turn it on and make sure that both sides you're doing are the same angle you know as close as you can possibly get it that's key and also don't ever try to do it edge up like this uh because it can your grinder can grab it and it'll throw it into your foot or whatever so don't do that so um we're gonna turn the grind around like i said really slow i run it on about 10 or 15 percent power um and man that crack is right in there really good but it shouldn't affect what we're doing today at least showing this um and i'm going to go ahead and set that secondary bevel real quick and you guys can kind of see here how i do it so so right there three passes and that side is probably about good um see if i can show really quick this this is a hard thing to show on camera too but um you can see that's what i just put on okay and we're calling that secondary sharpening bevel whatever you want to call it um and now i got to go and do the other side make sure your tracking is even too when you go from side to side make sure you adjust your tracking so it's the same on both sides so okay so here you can see we've got about three passes on both sides and you can actually if you look really close you can see that burr right on the edge there see that little white spot on the edge that's the burr up to the tip and you can see right there right here i need to do a little more grinding and it's all the way pulled up here as well so we're gonna switch to the 400 grit belt yeah there's a little burr there but it needs to be a little bit more like this we're going to switch the 400 grit belt and finish pulling that burrow you can alright you can see that burr along the whole edge now okay so i've just been struggling trying to show off what i'm talking about because this burr is really hard to show but it shows up pretty good right now you can see it all along the edge here and that's what you're wanting you need to pull that burr up or else you're never going to get it sharp okay so once you get that burr really even along the whole edge of the knife and you i i'm going to show that whole process in real time because a lot of people complain when i speed stuff up and you can see how fast that process is i'm literally you know like i said that edge was about twenty five thousand so you can get it all the way down in about three passes on each side and then you're refining it and you could probably take it up higher if you wanted to take it to 800 grit you could probably do that um or even higher but with the 400 grit belt and then the strapping belt i get really good results so i'm going to put this belt on now these leather belts um they're the tracking's a little funny with them it seems like and maybe maybe i got a funny one um but it says right in the directions that sometimes the tracking is a little off on them and so flip it and see which way you run it and figure out which way is better and it doesn't seem like i think this way is even worse yeah the tracking is just not very great with these things and maybe i like i said maybe i got a bad belt let me know if you guys order one of these let me know how your tracking is on it but i'm not putting a ton of pressure on it you can see and uh we're gonna run it really slow now these belts this is uh i'm trying to this is from pro sharpening supply super strap 2 by 72 leather belt and then it comes with a little bit of this white polishing compound so what i'm going to do is just kind of show you guys again bring the camera in a little bit and show you guys again i'm just going to put a little bit of this compound on here just a little bit you don't have to go crazy with it okay and then i'm going to take my knife and i'm taking i'm hitting the side that that burr popped on first okay so for me it's going to be this side and i'm kind of going a little bit flatter than what i put that secondary bevel on not way flatter but just a little bit nice light pressure like that same on the other side [Music] i'm going to do a couple passes on each side and then we'll see kind of where it's at because you don't want to do it too much but you need to make sure you've got that burner polished off and right now with just doing that you saw i did a couple passes um i just gotta do right there there's still a little bit [Music] okay so let's kind of check this out here okay so you can kind of see what i did there basically you know maybe three kind of slow passes on each side um and i guess what you're looking for is just to eliminate that burr you're trying to just polish that burr to where it's gone and you have a nice clean edge and right now like looking at it i can see that um just with what i just did there about three passes the bur is gone um which doesn't show up in the camera at all but i and it feels it feels pretty sharp okay so i'm kind of just testing this right on camera so you guys can see um i think that you can you can kind of do whatever you want with this i'm trying to show you guys the fastest way of getting a super sharp edge so um if you wanted to take it to 800 grit first before you put your strapping belt on um you could do that if you wanted to maybe use a couple different kinds of polish on that strapping belt you could probably do that as well and really get like a mirror edge and as you can see with this knife there's a nice little shine to it to that edge and i think we've got about a 90 perfect edge right now i could probably refine it a little bit more like i said but here's just like a piece of paper this is that really thin magazine paper again we're just kind of testing this right now and you can see it's really really good um like it it digs in a little bit i probably need to do a couple more passes but really really sharp like i said that's that's sharper than what any knife is that you buy at the store anyways yep i'll do probably one or two more passes i'm kind of just feeling it bite in a little bit and i can tell that that burr is gone but yeah i i need a like maybe one more pass on each side and it'll be perfect it's probably right now um shaving sharp if i had to guess let's see if let's see if there's any air left on my arm to test this out um let's see not really i do this too much let's do it right here yeah it's i mean it's shaving shaving sharp but uh you can always make it just a hair better but i think that shows man that's yeah it's really impressive how sharp that is um with how fast it's done you know if you are somebody that's into sharpening or you know a lot about it you know that sometimes you can you can spend as much time at it as you want and kind of continue to make that edge better and better now this is a great edge for a working hunting knife and it'll hold up really good it's obviously razor sharp and it was done and probably if i wasn't filming this i could have it done in about a minute if i wanted to um so hopefully that kind of shows you guys how to sharpen on a 2x72 belt grinder or any size belt grinder that you have um as quick as possible if you're trying to quick get an edge put on um and then like i said you can do whatever you want with it but that at least gives you the basics again 180 grit belt for that initial secondary bevel kind of finish it off with a 400 grit belt and then right to this strapping belt three four passes each side and bam just like that you've got a razor sharp edge i think that what you need to take from this video is you don't need to worry so much about your specific degree of what you're sharpening at i think that for me what i've learned is just consistency on both sides is very key and finding out what works for you what angle you like to sharpen at um and as you probably saw in the video i was kind of using my my hand right here to keep really constant pressure um and keep it really stable and even across the whole edge because i guess you can screw a knife up doing this so definitely practice first just like just like on the paper wheel system you need to practice it whatever you're doing before you just go out and do it on maybe a high-end knife so hopefully you guys learned something from this if you have any questions uh please please don't hesitate to drop them in the comments below if you learned something from this video make sure you subscribe you check out all my other videos drop a thumbs up all that stuff i really really appreciate it um and like always guys thank you for watching and i hope you have a good one

Channel: GentryCustomKnives

Views: 20,430

Keywords: knife sharpening, axe sharpening, how to sharpen a knife, sharp, sharpening, belt grinder, bushcraft, knife making, sharpen a knife, how to, knife sharp, leather strop, strop belt, stropping a knife, knife strop

Id: 8UgiiFTWw5A

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021