One Thing You Must Do For a Sharp Knife

so i wanted to do a quick video today that i've had so many people ask me about over the years and that is what exactly does a burr look like well today for the first time i'm actually going to be able to show you and why is it extremely important when you're sharpening a knife i've got a knife needs to be sharpened so let's quickly go to the sharpening stone we'll form a burr and then i'll show you what it looks like and i'll tell you why it's super important to form one before you move on to the next step in your sharpening which is strapping and removing the burr [Music] so let's go ahead and sharpen this knife we're gonna do that on a diamond stone we're going to apex the blade and that's just a fancy way of saying we're going to form an exact point along each side of the blade all the way down the middle now when we form that exact point what's going to happen is one piece of metal is going to roll over slightly on the other side and that is little piece that's hanging over it's going to be a burr so let's sharpen this real quick and i'll show you what that looks like okay so hopefully this is in focus here but we've got a burr on the knife and uh this is a video it's not a picture and i've got my pencil here as a pointer and this is kind of funny because i thought the pencil be a little bit smaller than it is let's uh let's show you the scale here real quick there's the tip of a pencil and i think that that actually will give you a little bit of scale to show you just how small the bur can be you can feel that with your fingertip if you just drag it over the over the blade but this will also show you why you can't see it with your naked eye because it's it's that small again it's a this is a pencil tip a regular regular size pencil not one of those big giant weird pencils that you get at the fair or something and this burr this little thread right here is from a towel if you wipe the if you wipe the knife off if you have water on it and stuff it'll catch anything and everything that you wipe it on so one good way to know that you do have a burr is to get out a towel wipe it across the edge and you'll see it'll collect a whole bunch of little threads on it like that and that's just that little tiny piece of metal that's been folded over catching all those threads and pulling them out first let me get a towel here and i'll wipe it off and i'll show you what happens so you can see how when i wipe the towel on it it picked up all those little threads there we go so that burr is uh collecting all those little threads or whatever they are from the paper towel so let me go ahead and flip this over and i'll show you the other side what that looks like so this is actually what you're feeling when you take your finger and swipe it over the edge like that you can feel that burr on that one side all right so i'm just sort of freehand holding this because it's really difficult to line up the camera in the same location but you can see on the other side it looks nice and smooth right so that means that the burr if you wipe your finger up over this side like that you don't feel anything cut your finger that's because the burr is actually laying over to the other side so let me flip this around and there's the burr sort of hanging over that side come on there we go why do you need to form a burr when you're sharpening so what a burr actually does is it tells you whether or not you fully apex because you know you're talking about something that you can't see with your naked eye but what you can do is you can feel that burr on one side of the knife with your finger if you form the burr and you can feel it with your finger that means that you're completely apexed so much so that that piece of metal folds over to the other side and forms that burr now the idea is that we want to remove the burr so that we're left with a nice sharp apex in the center of the blade and we don't have that folded over metal piece still on there inhibiting our cutting action so in order to help remove the burr we're gonna go back to the stone and then we're gonna take it to a strop to finish it off so what we're gonna do in order to help minimize the burr before we go to his drop is we're just going to take it and make a very light pass on the side that the burr is on so we feel the burr on this side with our finger so we'll just go ahead and we're going to make a very light pass at the same angle the on that side of the stone now we have slightly less of a burr than we did before so we're going to go ahead and do that again very light pressure just almost less than the weight of the knife [Music] we don't want to apply so much pressure that we end up forming a burr on the opposite side and then we have the same problem but we can no longer feel as much of the burr with our fingers we did before we still have a little bit in here in the center we'll go ahead and do that again yep and now i can't really feel anything on this side of the knife we've formed maybe a smaller burr on the opposite side so go ahead and do a couple very light back and forth passes and that should help minimize most of that fur this is a uh pretty much a brand new diamond stone so it's a little gritty that's why it uh sounds the way it does so a couple light back back and forth passes there and we are definitely minimized however we are not refined so let's go look at what this looks like now before we take it to the straw here's what the edge looks like before we take it to the strap you can see how much cleaner the edge looks by simply taking off that burr we no longer have that folded over piece of metal that we did before by doing those light passes we can also take our finger wipe it off the back side we don't feel anything and we can't feel anything on that side let me take this out of the clamp here and i'll show you the other side okay so here we are on the other side of the knife and you can see there's still a tiny tiny little bit of burr left and this is where are we there we go this is where a strap is going to come in handy because the strap is really going to clean up that edge and form that into a nice tight refined apex what we're going to do is go ahead and take this to a strap we'll give it a couple stroppings and i'll bring you back to show you what it looks like so this is a three micron diamond strap we'll give this a couple of uh passes back and forth and you can see as we strop that you'll see a little bit of roughness show up on the straw hopefully you can see that a little bit of roughness on the shop that's actually the birth dragging across the surface so that's another way to tell whether or not you formed the birds take it to the strap see if you see that roughness now as we stop that'll go away hopefully do a couple passes i'm trying not to block the camera here oh yeah that is definitely uh that's definitely sharp our strop is uh smoothing out we don't have any of those real rough uh drag marks on the strap that we did when we first started go ahead and wipe the blade off and i'll show you what it looks like okay so here we are back this is after a three micron strap and you can see just how much cleaner that edge looks and if we take our paper towel again we'll do the white we don't get any paper towel stuck on the edge and at this point this knife is very sharp this is a shaving chart so that's actually a hair whittling edge off of a three micron straw okay guys so hopefully that gave you a good visual as to what a bur actually looked like because for most of the time you can't see it with your naked eye the only way that you can tell whether or not you formed a burr is to take your finger and run it up the edge and you can feel that folded over piece of metal and again hopefully this gave you a good visual as to what you're feeling for the other thing i hope it showed you is that you don't need a whole lot of fancy equipment to get that knife super super sharp we used a single five 600 grit diamond stone and a three micron diamond strap and this thing is very very sharp as you saw we could even take this to a one micron drop and it would be even more hair whittling and that is a thing there are varying levels of hair whittling we'll get to that in a later video probably we'll see if anybody's interested i don't know but for now i just wanted to do a quick video and uh get this information out there because i get asked about the bur and what it looks like all the time so here it is thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 959,474

Rating: 4.9402266 out of 5

Keywords: knife sharpening, sharpening, how to sharpen a knife, knife sharpening for beginners, beginner knife sharpening, knife sharpening tips, knife sharpening easy, knife sharpening cheap, how to sharpen a knife easy, diy knife sharpening, knife sharpening burr, knife sharpening with stone, freehand knife sharpening, knife sharpening freehand, knife sharping to shaving sharp, hair whittling knife sharpening, knife sharpening close up

Id: ZTuZB8uGbaU

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Kavik_79]

Hair whittling sharp off a 600 grit diamond plate and stropping only to remove the burr, not to polish to a mirror....love the example this sets!

Thanks for sharing this

[u/howlingwolf487]

I was amazed at how ragged it STILL looks after getting it “hair-poppin’ sharp”.

[u/Chemical_Suit]

I dig it. I just got a much less powerful loupe and this takes it to the next level. Loved the pencil point.

[u/ophanimmm]

I’m so glad he’s back 😌😌

[u/Dean_Gulbury]

This was extremely interesting. Thanks for posting it.

[u/itwasntme40591]

Outdoors55 is a great channel! I've been watching him, Burrfection, and KnifeKrazy for a while now. Burrfection is like ASMR for sharpening, but I prefer this guy's sharpening method...seems much easier.

[u/Uncle_Sam313]

Awesome video

[u/KeyResults]

Another take to answer and demonstrate the most common stumbling block to most new to knife sharpening. Nice and simple. That loaded diamond strop can get a lot of people in trouble though by rounding off apex. Easy does it on the pressure! 3 micron diamond cuts quickly.

[u/19sage87]

Great post!