Bushcraft Basics Ep13 - Knife Maintenance

Description

Knife Maintenance in the field.

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

See the Amazon Store for Stropping Compounds.

Amazon Store:

UK Store - http://astore.amazon.co.uk/mcqbushcraft-21

US Store - http://astore.amazon.com/mcq-20

Merchandise:

T-Shirts - http://mcqbushcraft.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Connect On My Website - http://www.MCQBushcraft.co.uk

Connect On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MCQBushcraft

Connect On Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/mcqbushcraft1

Connect On Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/MCQBushcraft

Tags: woodland,forest,mountains,river,lake,tinder,Survival,Bushcraft,survivor,knife,knives,valley,axe,camping,tent,footwear,hunting,fishing,backpack,clothing,boots,primitive,nature,shelter,shooting,shotgun,rifle,rucksack,flashlight,torch,craft,plants,trees,education,wilderness,wood,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game,Outdoor,Travel

Video Transcription

hi there guys Mike from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to another episode of bushcraft basics in the last episode we have a look at knife safety and we really just highlighted a little bit of common sense to help you out when you're using knives in the field because if you're far away from people or civilization and you have a serious injury that injury is always amplified given the distance you are away because you can't get help too easily but in this week's episode we're actually going to be having a look at maintaining knives and maintaining knives is a pretty variable subject it really depends on a lot of different factors what are you actually using the knives for in terms of the material the blade is being put through what kind of environment to you in you by the coastline you in a very hot dry environment is it humid or is it very damp and wet and what's your knife made of what kind of steel what kind of materials is your knife actually made of what's the sheath made of all these things can really affect the lifespan of your knife and how often you need to take a look at it and maintain it and hopefully this video will help pay in front of me here I have three knives and they're three very different knives in some respects we have a maurer here with a carbon steel blade and plastic handle we have a jack lor knife here and that has a one tool steel so a carbon steel blade a wooden handle although this wood is very much like plastic in a respect because it's been stabilized and stabilization means wear resin is sucked into the grain and it almost becomes like plastic unable to absorb anything and it's a more modern process you see a lot these days that knife makers use because it stops wood expanding and shrinking with temperature and humidity in the air and moisture obviously we have another knife here which has g10 four scales and this is a stainless steel and this is our WL 34 which is an incredibly high performance steel very expensive to actually use our WL 34 but edge retention and the performance of the steel is way above many carbon steels so this one here is of the lowest in terms of its maintenance so just for having a brief look at these knives here and this is obviously a tiny selection of what's actually out there and there are very lot of different variations and things you can do with the Steel's to protect them like coated carbon blades for example you can get a very good idea of how choosing the right knife for your environment is quite important if you live on the coastline you spend a lot of time coastal foraging or fishing when you're in that environment and you decide to go with a carbon steel knife and a leather sheath you're in for a pretty difficult ride in some respects you'll be maintaining that knife all the time and it will there it will never simply have a very hard life and probably see a lot of corrosion but let's have a look at some items here that we can use to maintain these knives and we'll go over how you can actually maintain the knife I've got some basic items here and these are really just maintenance tools that are useful blades that I carry with me in the field sometimes I do carry my Jack lure on me and it's useful to have things like oil to help protect the carbon steel blade so I've got here a small pot and this is a brass oil pot out of a Lee Enfield rifle and one of the older pots you'll find they're brass they went to bakelite a bit later and they're more common and they're actually a bit cheaper but these brass pots are quite nice if you do end up getting one of these what I will suggest is that you just replace this seal here it will be leather replace it with a bit of rubber on that way there's no chance of it leaking but if we open this up you can see it's full of oil and it's got an applicator just there so you can put the oil wherever you wish it's quite good for firearms as well which is obviously its original intention and that lip there that light applicator really does help put it into the action of the firearm that you carry on you so it's a good little multifunctional tool to actually use for maintaining metal objects that you bring out with you in the field that praying to corrosion and being brass it's a quite sturdy and not going to actually rot on you there the kind of oil I use in this is a walnut oil but food-grade walnut oil and that way I can actually take this off pour this into a pan and fry things for example if you wanted to fry some stinging that leaves and make some crisps you can pour this into a frying pan put the stinging nettle leaves in fry them and then you've got some food there to snack on on the trail so to have a food grade oil it means you could use it on your skin as well so you can put it on your hands to moisturize them so they didn't get very velcro II like they do and you're in the field for a long time

or on your lips if you've got chapped lips a useful little pot there I do you carry a honing stone as well this is a Spyderco Double Stuf stone it's got a coarse side which is actually very fine and a very very fine honing side which is fantastic when the blade just maybe has a little bit of a a nick in it for example like it's just a slight dullness in one area and you just need to bring it back and this is also very useful for an axe as well it's quite long and it can be used to actually home the axe back to being a shaving sharp as well it does come in a leather sort of sheath look you know container I did try using this as a strop and I just found the grain of the leather to be too fast the grain is just a bit too fast for me I prefer a bit of a finer grain for a strop much harder thinner level leather and this is just a bit too fast but that doesn't mean you can't remake one it's not exactly difficult to make something like this two plates of leather stitch around they gay you can make yourself a strop and the nice thing about that is the sharpening stone underneath will be that hard flat surface for you to strop on and that makes quite a nicer set actually so at some point I will make a leather case for this that will act as a strop but for the time being I'm just using it as it is to protect the actual stain but I do have a little strop here just something I use for the time being just a piece of oak with some hard leather on and this leather is quite but very hard really really dense oak tanned leather and the kind of thickness of the leather you're going to use will really have to reflect the kind of knife you carry and we'll touch on that in a second but this is a strop and I have some stropping compound there this is Starkey blue and this is a very good stropping compound or you can use also sole as well which is used on cars for polishing metal and there are also many other stropping compounds around that you'll see in the description below this video so it doesn't have to be Starkey blue because if you're in the States you might have trouble getting hold of this and that's really my maintenance kit for which other tools I bring out with me the leather you use for stropping can really be picked to suit the grind of your knife for example if you have a Scandinavian grind blade which is a quite a flat zero grind and you want to keep that zero grind you wouldn't choose a very thick soft piece of leather to actually strop on because that leather will compress as you drag that bevel through and it'll start to round it gradually over time any very very slowly and it be very subtle but if you want to keep that true zero grind to have that blade perform its optimum when working with wood you would really want to choose a different leather to strop on rather than something thick and spongy so a very thin hard piece of leather would probably be a bit better with a very fine grain to conform true to that zero grind and really keep it as is it's a bit like stropping off of a tree with a belt if I took this belt off and hooked it onto this hazel tree here and I was dropping away and I was using a Scandi grind it can't be really bad for the bevel you may want you know if you're out in the middle of nowhere and you're in a situation and you had to do that to your knife you're better off putting the belt on a flat surface and doing it that way then conforming to that bevel so you're not rounding it quite horribly over a long period of time obviously it's all very subtle but it does make a difference and when you hold the blade to the light you can actually see that you know you can see that rounding take place some people like the blade to be slightly rounded I know a lot of people who do because it makes it a little bit stronger in the field they even add a secondary bevel to a Scandi grind to make it even tougher so it doesn't roll too easily but if you just want to keep that true Scandi grind for working with wood ease a thin flat piece of leather and mount it to a block of wood like this and and it will it'll strop a lot better and conforms that edge but if you have got a convex ground blade then stropping off of a tree won't be so bad or using a thick piece of spongy leather it's kind of really what you want to do to conform so that rounded edge a bit more and that would actually have benefits whether it wouldn't with other cut types of grinds so you can see how choosing the right piece of leather feels strop is quite important you don't want to be using techniques in the field and actually kind of making your knife worse but really the first part of maintaining a knife is seeing whether a knife needs maintenance and there are a few things you can do the first thing you can do is look down the blade and hold it to the light and see whether you can see any flat spots on the edge where you can actually see light reflecting off of it and you can tilt the blade ever so slightly and just see whether you can see any flat areas and that will tell you that the edge is ever so slightly rolled you don't want any chips but rolls are fairly normal on an edge if you give it a lot of abuse and this one's been really heavily abused in the last two weeks and I would expect a little bit of rolling here and there and there's just too tiny little spots there and there where light is reflecting back at me so that could do with being strop type we look at this chap law here I would probably expect the same it's been used very heavily recently I'm just holding it up to the light and again on the belly in fact just there we have a little flat spot there where the edges just rolled very slightly and that could do with being strop that as well so that doesn't need to be resharpen dand neither does that just dropping those rolls out will be absolutely fine and that's all we need to do in terms of maintenance so if I'm using my carbon steel knife

magic law here we had a look at the blade and on the edge there we saw a little bit of micro rolling which is very normal it's had a bit of a hard job to do I wouldn't use the stain it doesn't need to be used at all in terms of maintenance I would take the strop it's on a piece of wood so I've always got a flat surface it's easy to find a flat surface in a classroom environment when you're acting bushcraft courses but when you actually get out into the woods there's very few of them unless you make your aim by making half boards for example like you would a bow drill set but we can just put a bit of stropping compound on it's already a bit on there we don't need too much and on this log here I'll just try and conform to the edge I've got Ivy here and some lumps there so never an ideal environment which is why you have to make it comfortable for yourself but you can see just need to conform to that edge and just carry on going through my usual easy two strikes either side and you push quite hard not really should have taken it out that looks a lot better no light reflecting just there anymore it doesn't need much it's only a micro roll tiny little thing and that should be shaving sharp after stropping it I would just take a little bit of oil you don't need much and place it on the blade like that was you sighs you use my finger a lot of the time because a rag steals quite a bit of the oil but a rag will help you clean the blade as well you can always carry some very very fine wet and dry paper to clean any SAP stain off the actual carbon steel which is fairly common and we can just put this back in the sheath hopefully the sheath is dry I wouldn't put it back in a wet sheath by the way you cna got to put it back in a dry Shi and that's it that's the end of the day by the campfire and your knifes ready to go in your pack and you can go to bed the grind on this knife is a little bit different this is a full flat with a micro bevel and I think a lot of the confusion the people will be what angle do I hold the blade er it really is just do it by eye in some respects and by feel you can see when the light actually disappears at the edge of the blade there and it doesn't really require much difference than a scandi grime in fact I find micro bubbles easier to work with you have a nice little choil there so you can use all of the blade on a stone if needed

you'll see the polishing compound turning gray where it's removing dirt and also fragments of metal really really small amount of metal so I'm just periodically checking this looking for patches of light that I saw before and you can see that I've pretty much removed all of it and it's looking how it was when it arrived perfect and that should be shaving sharp which it is and obviously it a blade like this our WL 34 is a pretty high performance stainless steel won't require any oiling so that can just go back in the sheath sheath is Kydex not going to hold any moisture so you can see how different knives really require different levels of maintenance and you know work better in different environments but there are other things you can use to sharpen or hone blades out in the woods there are many different items natural items like that that you can actually use for example you can use pebbles off of the beach this is an axe puck that I made while I was on the coastline doing some fishing and found this stain very very fine-grained stain and it's very useful as a puck for an axe you can use flats things as well if you spend some time flattening them out and rubbing two stains against each other you can make honing stains out in the wild if you have that kind of quality of stain availability out in the woods here where I am there's nothing like that but on the case line there's a lot of stains some of them are very very fine grain that can be used to polish blades and even get a mirror finish you can find types of funghi as well clip tape or a special Innes or birch poly pool often nicknamed the razor strop funghi grows on silver birch obviously quite frequently and exclusively and at this time of year they're very young they're little buttons like this but they grow very long large and flat and you can actually dry them out and they really must be dried if you're going to strop on them when they dry they're almost like a leather like a like a modeling foam very dense very hard and you can get a thin strip of it and actually mount it to a piece of board and strop on it and it's very very effective at bringing knives back to a bit of a razor sharp edge if they've got slight micro rolling in them even animal hide as well this is a rabbit hide and you could use the leather on this if you soaked this and got the hair right use the leather on it is a very thin fine leather and if you mounted that on a board I'd be ideal for a scandi grinder or a bevel that you want to keep at a zero grind for example really nice piece of suede and really nice to strop on as well if it were glued to a board correctly so there are things you can use when you're out and there are skills you can practice obviously this is a bit of a a basic in bushcraft basics we're just covering basic skills and getting kit together ready to go out and practice skills but the further you going to bushcraft skills you can start getting into those sorts of things and trying them out and realize that there are things provided out here by by nature really that you can use to to maintain your tools if you're in wilderness living situations one piece of equipment that's useful to carry with you is a honing stone and stropping might not be enough sometimes to get little rolls out depending on how severe they are and a stain like this this is a Spyderco double-stuff stain you can buy them singly or you can buy them glued together like this two different grades and it's a very very fine stain to use iced use one of the DC stones this is a DC 4 and they were pretty good stains but compare them to what they used to be like and they are worlds apart if you see an original DC stain and you compare it to one of the newer ones it's like comparing marble to to a brick it's just two totally different grains really or grades of of stain and the newer ones aren't so good they're very coarse they're okay but unfortunately they change their design and that's just really the way it is now so if you have an older one then hang on to it because it's a it's really a really nice piece of kit if you have one of the newer ones you may be looking at some point in the future to move over from that on to something a bit better when you're in the field and these Spyderco ones are excellent and they're very fine they're great for honing

on this knife here there is a slight micro roll that I couldn't get out from stropping I really just noticed it whilst making the video later on I can actually see the light coming off of it we've got some Sun coming through the trees there I can see it and if you're fairly confident with one of these things it doesn't take much to just hold it and just drag the blade toward you and away from you like this and it won't need much and when you get confident with these things you'll know the angles and it'll just you'll do it all by eye really I'm using the white side which is the finer side because it really is just a micro bevel and that's completely gone now just with a few passes on the stone and that's really what a lot of sharpening is about I suppose it's just identifying where on the blade needs attention and then rectifying it by using fine tools and taking away as a little metal as possible so I hope this video has been useful just regarding some very basic maintenance out in the field we've covered a variety of different things but obviously we haven't covered sharpening we were touched on this stain here just just a honing stone used very much like the strop in a respectful just kind of taking out roles and things on your blade I mean your blade will very rarely go dull in the field if you keep on top of maintenance and that's really the key maintaining that edge will really save you from overhauling it later down the line and I think when you're new to bushcraft you've just got yourself a nice knife you look at that edge straight out of the box it can vary it can be very daunting to think one day that you have to sharpen that and make it as good as it is or better than it was when it came out the box I think people can hold off of that and by just doing some very simple maintenance you will hang on to that edge and you will maintain it for as long as you need to and only really when the knife has to do some seriously obscene work will the blade double roll so badly that we'll have to go on the stain but in next week's episode we're actually going to have a look at sharpening a knife it will be very similar to what we've done here just obviously using materials that are designed to take more metal off rather than less and we'll be doing it in a setting that's a bit more comfortable to simulate being at home and we'll also touch on this stone a bit more here and using it just to remove some rolls that might not be able to be removed from stropping so I hope this videos helped and thank you for watching and I'll see very soon for another episode of bushcraft basics and please see the links below in the description if you're interested any of the products in this video or other links on the channel thanks again for watching guys take care