Why your knife gets dull after you strop! Learn to strop the Coalcracker Way!

today we're gonna shave my beard off with this knife [Music] so i'm not going to be shaving my beard off just because i like a little too much um but what i'm going to be doing is showing you how to get a knife from sharp to scary sharp today right here right now so let me get myself repositioned and we'll get rolling so we're in the shop today we are not outside hanging out doing a lot of work and one of the things that i was working on today was making new strops and i had to make myself a new strop because i don't know where mine's at it's somewhere in the woods i guess i don't know so i had to make a new one now with that said we're gonna be talking about how to use a strop and the most common mistake people make with these things and we're also going to talk about a field our alternative so first thing is i am a huge sharpening stone guy i think the sharpening stone gets your knife more than sharp enough for any field tasks you're going to use even when i'm out there extended amounts of time my sharpening stone gets my knife back to where it needs to be but there are times with specific knives especially smaller knives like this or knives you're going to use specifically for butchering or even skinning out animals that you want it like an absolute razor so a little sharpening stone just like this always gets the job done i did a bunch of videos already on this um you can use both sides right so if you have bigger chunks or something taken out of the knife itself you're going to use the diamond side and then you're going to flip over to the ceramic side and touch that thing up and it will get to the point that you can shave hair right off your arm or like i said if you want to shave off your beard but to take it one step further you need to do something called a strop so there's a lot of different straps out there but they all have the same general makeup of them it's some type of leather with some type of stropping compound on it and we are going to take our knife to that next level with it but there's a huge mistake people make all the time when they use this and it actually ruins the sharpness of their knife more than increases the sharpness so let's go back here and i'm going to show you the proper way to do this so first and foremost you want to make sure that your knife is already sharp it should not be dull at all if it's dull this device is not going to just immediately bring that back you want to start with a sharp knife so what we're going to do with this this is just leather and there's stropping compound on here so first of all when you do this if you know anything about it we're going to be dragging the blade across this dropping compound and that is going to be in sense buffing out this edge and making it super fine super sharp okay so we never cut into the leather because if we take our blade edge and go this way we're going to just cut the strop it's not going to be good trust me i've seen people do that so whenever we stop we're going to start at the end and we're going to come away from the blade so the blade is here we're coming away this way okay now the next thing when we do this okay and i'm starting with nice green compound your strop is not gonna look like this after one two a hundred uses it's gonna start to get a black dirty finish to it and that's okay that is actual metal which you're gonna see here in a minute being removed from the knife blade and being left behind i like to just let that on my strap that very very fine metal mixed with this dropping compound makes for a better cutting buffing surface okay all right so we're gonna do we're gonna start i like to start with the tip edge whatever you're most comfortable with we're going to lay our knife down and we are going to drag it across the strop just like this now you can see as i do this i'm keeping a nice consistent angle and i'm moving pretty quickly okay that's part of the key we don't want to go really really slow with this we actually want a little bit of friction and heat to build up along that edge okay and then we're also going to do it the other way so i'm going to put it in here finding my angle and i'm running it along now what you're going to notice right away is look at all this stuff on my shop if i leave it angle like this okay that is material being removed from the edge of my knife and my knife edge is going to start getting sharper so now i will continue this feeling my knife edge without cutting myself testing it on a piece of paper or the hair on my arm any of those things to see if it is getting the job done now here's the biggest mistake people make when it comes to strops is finding the angle okay and then not finding the angle so what i mean by that is with something like this scandi grind it's very easy to lay my knife flat push it down and i'm laying on that correct bevel okay so on the edge of my knife is touching the edge of my strap as i slide it across okay i'm on the right angle now the problem is people hold this handle very tight and as they come along here they start to turn the knife up this way so what you're actually doing at that point is you're taking your sharp edge and you are grinding it and sliding it across compound it is made to cut metal so we're cutting our edge off now so we need to make sure that we keep it flat the whole way through on that angle okay so if it's on that angle and bevel and we come through here we're going to be good as soon as you start to roll this up not good that's when people ruin the edge now an alternative to that method if you don't have a strop block is to just literally take off your belt if you good high quality belt it will work perfectly for stropping so my case all leather belt you're going to find a tree in this case our protein tree i'm going to just run my belt through like this and i'm going to use the back side of it okay the rougher side not the smooth outside but the rougher back side and then all that i'm going to do is i'm going to keep tension on this and i'm going to continue doing the same thing we just did there i'm going to find my angle and i'm going to slide it up and away up and away now i'm going to slide it down away again my edge is pointing up find my angle and i slide it across just like this okay very very simple the key to doing this is to keep tension on your belt if you leave this loose and your belt is moving like this yeah that's moving inward generally what's happening is as you do that the belt's flexing too much and that edge is starting to grind too much into that leather and you're knocking your edge off rather than making it sharper so keep it nice and tight as tight as you can and run it along now you know i'm not going to leave you hanging you're probably wondering well dan didn't put anything on the back of his belt is there compound there what's going on so you can go ahead and put compound and i've done it in the past with some belts i put a little strip of compound on my belt and i utilize it that way but the reality is that if your knife is super sharp to begin with and you utilize that back side of your belt without even stropping compound if you go quick enough and you do it long enough that is still going to do somewhat of the same as a strop with compound it's not going to be as good but for a field expedient this thing works great so there you go quick fun thing for all of you to try over the weekend here this knife just doing that little bit of stropping that i've done already when i run my finger like this i could tell it is that much sharper so i'm going to work on this drop a little bit more with it i can't really give you a recommendation on how many times should you strap each side you just want to make sure that it's consistent on both sides and then you have to test it that's going to depend knife to knife metal to metal and uh also skill set how much you're pushing pressure all that stuff so give it a try start with an old knife and then move into your good high quality knives and uh i know another great tool for the toolbox so that's it that's today's video hope you enjoyed it um if you're looking for strops we do make them but there's a million different ones online you can get them just about anywhere from amazon to like even i think home depot sells drops in the sharpening section so you can go check all that stuff out and uh i think that's about it so make sure your knives are sharp and get out in the woods stay in the woods when you're there i gotta get to the woods now that's what i'm doing i'm done here long week you

Channel: Coalcracker Bushcraft

Views: 660,235

Keywords: Coalcracker Bushcraft, Dan Wowak, Appalachian Bushman School, Camping, Hiking, Survival, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Bushcraft Skills, outdoorlifestyle, survivalinstructor

Id: pmLTTz91xR8

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022