Bushcraft Basics Ep14: Knife Sharpening

Description

In this episode we look a Knife Sharpening on a Whetstone

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

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

Video Transcription

hi there guys smite from seeker bushcraft here and welcome to episode 14 of bushcraft basics in last week's episode we focused on maintaining knives and we have a look at a variety of knives some of which you'll recognize that I've got here with me today and we talked about different types of grinds and different types of metals and really just applied a bit of a a simple maintenance technique that you can use in the field along with some really simple items that you can carry with you and keeping on top of maintenance is essential if you can keep on top of maintenance then you really will keep your edge in tip-top condition almost all of the time when you're working out in the field and you'll very rarely let your knife get to a state where it needs to be put on the stone and regrind to get that edge back so you can maintain it further a little bit like this more here this knife was given to me by a friend of mine he wanted me to put an edge on it or and we'll put an edge back on it which it really does need it's got past the point of where a strop can save it because it's just not been maintained at all it's been used and abused and as a result the edge is rolled quite horribly and there's lots of flat spots lots of light reflecting back at me and very blunt very dull I mean I can run my finger across the belly repeatedly and it will not cut me at all

in this tub here in front of me I've got a Japanese whetstone but this whetstone here is made by King which is quite a popular make and we've got a coarse side just here we've got a very fine side just here this is a 1,000 grit side and this is a six thousand grit side so this is a finishing side and this is really taking off more material for example when we come to working with this knife this more here is going to have to be put on this side first and then finished on this side here you can get finer sides than this even finer finishing stains and six thousand you can go past 8,000 in some respects but really this is all that I kind of need and this stone here can be stored in water and doesn't really need to be dried out the stain is being stored in water at the moment because before we use it it needs to be left in water for about 15 minutes to absorb lots of water and become totally saturated which will obviously aid in its performance will help it clean itself

then we're sharpening it and it will give us better results so it's been in there for quite a while and it can be actually taken out there and we can start to use it and we'll start with this site just here before we actually do any sharpening and put our knife on the actual stain we'll have a look at the stain itself and look at the condition it may be an old stone that you've picked up you may have bought a new one either way it's good to just check it out you can see the edges on this have been filed away so there's no Rises on the edge some stains you combine straight out of the box can be higher on the edges than they are in the center and what happens is you put your knife down and as you drag it along you see the material is being drip sore tongue the way there and there but actually not in the center and you don't want it to be like that so most decent stains will be rounded off and have no rises in them and they should be perfectly flat but you can always check if they are perfectly flat as well and regularly top a bit of water up on them as you work with them and if you've got a stain that's kind of wavy it's always good to level the stain off before you actually work with it especially if you've got a big project of putting a good edge back on a knife and you can do that just with another stain and by rubbing the same across the top of the whetstone like this you'll see areas and depressions where water can gather a material can gather and it will give you a good idea how flat the stain is now this one it's perfectly flat and there's nothing that we really need to do with it at all but if there was an area that had a depression you would see material collect in it a little bit like a divot another way is to get a pencil and you can draw like a grid all across the stone and as you do this you'll see areas where the pencil is removed in areas where it isn't and that will tell you if there are rises and drops in the actual stain but this one looks good and it's ready to work with so before we put the knife on the stone we'll take a bit of water put it on the wet stone just top it up and I'll do that pretty regularly throughout the process to stop it gumming up just make sure the surface is pretty pretty flat we've got a bit of rocking there that's a bit better and this is a Scandinavian grind we've talked all about grinds in the last few episodes and different types of steel so this will be a very easy one to sharpen the bevel is very large and you'll see the bevel just sits quite flat and at first I'm just going to rock it back and forth like this this is generally the way I start off when I'm doing the whole blade in this case and I'm just keeping that bevel nice and flat and on the push stroke I'm putting a lot of pressure but when I come back I'm really just dragging it very lightly I'm not trying to do anything at all apart from get back there's another way of doing it really or there's many ways and this is just my technique I'm sharing with you that's that you can obviously do this and this is quite nice when you're using a Scandinavian grind on a large bevel I just quite like doing this because it always just keeps that bevel nice and flat and I'm trying to take a lot of material away so at first I'll be using this technique

you can see that slurry building up and there we have it I mean that's looking a lot better already and some of this slurry here can be used to clean the rest of the blade with your fingers but really there's no set amount of strokes that we're actually going to use here there's not 20 times this way 30 times this way it's about looking at the blade it's about looking at that edge and seeing what's happening to it and that's really the key to sharpening things properly is looking at the edge you really want to do as much as you need to to get it back to where it was you can see we've still got a bit of a nasty roll there so it's still going to need some more work so I might put a bit more water on

and carry on on the other side just dragging towards myself you can always tilt the knife like this in this case to follow that angle to a sharpening all of the edge we can always take a softer approach later when we've got quite a lot of material off

just have a look at it again yeah I mean it's getting better but he still needs a lot of work getting there it's looking a lot better just keep going with it once all the lights gone I'll change sides

but until then keep going time to focus a bit more on that belly now because that's the part of the blade that's in the worst condition the flat of the blade is white nice snack cleaning the blade with a cloth really helps or else all the particles from the stain make it difficult to see the edge but we've really improved that considerably you can see that it's a very clean edge that stain is just polished it up perfectly and we can put it on the finishing stain very Singh and just really going to run my finger across it see if there's any rough spots there's one just there can feel a rough spot as you go across you just feel it very slightly but the belly feels really good now it was horrific before I'm just cleaning it on my fleece here because it's it's a pretty old fleece and I don't really mind that I use a rag when I'm at home a bit of kitchen towel or something you've got a tiny bit of reflection coming back it could do with just a few more passes on this coarse side here and then we'll be ready to switch over there was just a coarse spot there

the better the blade becomes from this process the more you see it slicing material away from the stone the same changes as well the more use tool this you get the more you can really start to understand what's happening just from fear and sight and sound you stop thinking about angles and worrying about all these little things and it just becomes quite a sort of encapsulating process really that you can start to enjoy

there we go I think that's probably it there

yeah that is beautiful that's looking really good so much better than it looked before so we can flip staying over now just going to give that a clean actually

and again with this side here we can just take the stain here and just just check out the level and actually clean it as well this can take away all the metal fragments that get lodged in the stain and clean the stain up of it we can see if we've got any rises and drops in fact I can see a trough just there where a lot of the material is collecting it's a little bit like plastering a wall the cavities pick up the sludge well while the rest of it kind of slips away so that's looking pretty good though it's nice and flat a little bit more water and onto the finishing side there why look at that metal coming off so these black marks here the metal actually coming off of the blade obviously a bit of dirt as well but there we go feels completely different to the other side it's almost like you're running it across some marble this is really honing it's in there so with the Scandinavian grind this is all pretty straightforward process the grind is all predetermined it's quite a large bevel it sits on the stain really easily and I'm not doing this a set amount of times it's just all really just looking at the edge and inspecting it every now and then I think we're pretty much done here the belly might need a bit of attention look at that that is perfect so the edge of my thumb here has got quite a lot of calluses on we run the knife just along the edge of my thumb you'll see it's taking on quite a lot of skin they're not exactly the most pleasant way of testing it but we'll put this on the strop now and just finish it off a little bit and that'll be it you're nice and sharp I've got a little block of wood here and this would simulate the edge of a table which is often the way I work and we have a look at stropping in last week's episode very easy to do much probably be about it that polishing stain on the wet stain there would have done a lot of work for us and we can see now that that is a peaceful edge so compared to the way it was Bor this is now shaving sharp and see it's taking off quite a lot of hair there and that would be a beautiful edge to use and can be maintained very easily so with a whetstone it's a it's a nice grind really a knife to work with we maintain very easily in the field now so the way in which we use this whetstone which may very easy work of this more a knife here we can use this Spyderco double-stuff stone in almost exactly the same way it sort of like a scaled-down version this field friendly in a respect and if push comes to shove this can be use doesn't need to be soaked like the Spyderco stain but every now and then it will need to be cleaned in that respect just help it perform properly which can be done by wiping it even using a little bit of oil that you bring out with you in the field most of the time this is just a honing stain for me I see an area that it needs a bit of attention in the field it can be used quite easily just on this side just to take out things that perhaps drop income so if something gets too bad but that's very rare it's always a real trade-off really when you're out in the field in some respects is you can't carry all this heavy gear with you to make life comfortable sometimes but you've got here really the same thing just to feel friendly versions so if you are going to use a stain like this in the field and you do have to probably best just focus on the portion of the blade that needs that attention so on this it was more of the belly that needed some work so I'd focus more on that part of the blade to actually get it back to shavings on this knife here is made of a much harder steel than the a1 carbon steel is supposed it's stainless and as a result it's got a much smaller grind on it to see to that type of steel the difficulty is is unlike the scandi you can't just sit it on the actual stone and find the bevel really easily and some people get very concerned about angles if you have got a knife like this and the edges in absolute tatters you can choose your own angle because you'll be regrinding it anyway so by using a coarse stone you will determine that angle and then hopefully given that you've created the or you can follow suit naturally get the edge you're looking for but if you're just tidying something up for example which is in the most common cases say there's a roll or something which is pretty unlikely for this steal but if there was we really needed to tidy it up and it had to go on the stain we could use this finishing stain here to help get that out maybe we can't find the angle just clean the blade there and a tip you can use at home is just to get a pan and just draw a line along the edge like that and it just helps you see whether you're actually taking off the material that's required if we start like that really shallow and do this there's no way we're going to be taking any of that ink off but if we start like this which I know that is a much more Intune angle to the edge then that the ink is all gone it is that sort of angle there it's really what you're looking for

if you are working with full flats like this maybe you've got an SC knife a lot of those have full flats then worrying about the angles can always be a bit of a big deal but there's the key really the keys in maintaining that edge that you already have and as you maintain it you strop it you look after it in the field he's a honing staying like the Spyderco double stufs thing to take out anything that might be a little bit too much from stroke angle you'll always be maintaining that edge you have and the angles will never change and I'll never be a worry if you have to bring it onto a stone because it's in tatters then you can use a pen to just find out whether you're holding it at the right angle another way obviously is putting it on the stone and looking at it very closely and seeing where the light disappears at the actual edge but that can be a little bit more tricky with such a small pebble that and if you're in dark light then it can be even trickier so the key is really to just maintenance all these things and maintenance is really the way to go on your axes on your knives on your souls as well but my advice to you just to be you're new to bushcraft in your buying yourself a knife you've already talked about getting a knife and it was the more heavy duty this one here a really easy knife to look after not expensive and a great one to just practice with them you know people with a lot of experience carry these all over the world as a same other videos I've got friends of mine your instructors and they still use these after their tens of years of using knives at in the field and here's this one here because it is a fantastic night for the very good eat tree and being inexpensive you can do all the things you want to do with it and in the back of your mind you don't have that worry a lot of these other lives are just sentimental really because people like myself and other people have a hand in the design process you can see it being made as I did with a lot of these ones here and the actual workshops so

but life to stayin have some practice and it'll all become clear and with a scandi grind it's really easy anyway but I hope this video helped out thanks for watching if you're interested any of the links in description or any other information do you have a look at the description and I'll see you very soon in another episode take care guys and thanks again