Using a Strop to Clean, Sharpen, and Hone your Blades

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Video Transcription

okay let's talk real quick about the difference between sharpening your knife and honing our knife when we sharpen our knife we are actually using a grit material like a stone to remove metal from the knife and reform the blade to attain sharpness we would then hone the blade after the fact to make sure that we have removed any burr that we've created during a sharpening process and refine that blade edge what happens well your knife gets dull if you haven't truly abused your knife for a long period of time is your blade will look like this under magnification and you will have a misalignment of your blade edge and when you hone a knife all you're doing is bringing it back into alignment so there's a sharp again we should prefer to hone our knife all the time over sharpening our knife we're not removing as much material even if we're using a honing compound which are a clay based compound we're not removing near as much material by honing as we are sharpening so in this video we're going to specifically cover honing our knife this is something that I do after almost every use of my knife if it's for an ally you can use different types of stropping devices this is a pal strop with a rougher leather side and a Swizzle aside we'll talk about that in just a minute you can use a belt strop and there are advantages and disadvantages to this which we'll talk about in a minute and this is just a saddle leather type belt that I wear around my waist that you can carry in the woods and also use for a strop if you need to I use a honing compound to say tormek honing compound that's got some grit to it so you'll have a grit side of your strop and you'll have a non grit sybers Drive if you're using the grit side of your strap that has compound on it you are doing some sharpening of your blade once you go to the other side and you have nothing on here but the leather you are now stropping the blade to refine the edge we're going to talk about both convex grinds and we're going to talk about the groin

like a pocketknife which could be a hollow around and we'll also talk about Scandinavian time grinds in this video okay real quick let's talk about this compound we have a rough and a smooth side on this strop we're going to take compound we're going to dress this drop on the rougher side so kind of feel it feel out which side is better for you to use your compound on and then basically just support some compound this is a new one here escort some compound on the leather itself just like that it doesn't need to be a lot and then just rub it into the leather just like this and that will dress your strop for use and you can redress this strop as often as you feel necessary it doesn't have to be done every single time you use it now the other advantage of this dropping compound is if I've got a blade like this case hunter it's got some heavy patina on it and I want to clean it up just a little bit maybe I left it in my backpack and it got moist I can squirt a little bit of compound onto some type of a rough muslin material like a rag or something like that and I can then use that to kind of wipe my blade down with gently just like this and you can see the color

coming off you just be mindful and careful of what you're doing wipe it down really well and then with the clean side you can wipe the compound off but when you strop the knife you'll wipe the compound off anyway after the fact and then you can take that knife and you can use the compound side and just register the bevel and pull towards you register on the bevel and pull towards you register on the bevel and push away from you and you can do multiple strokes in one direction or you can change every time just like this and now you're kind of sharpening this blade because you've got a little bit of grit on your so you are removing some material so if you've let your blade go just a little bit further than you should have it's dropping with compound should bring it back without having to take it to something as rough as a stone now once you have done as many strokes as you think you need to do with the compound on there and it could be up to 50 on each side to get that blade polished and hone in where you want to or sharpen to where you want it back to then you can go to the dry side they come on the dry side and do your final honing process of that blade the same way

now generally when I finish working on my blade and I'll do the other one as well I usually use ballast all to just lubricate the blade before I put it away and I don't worry about getting all my handles and all that stuff it doesn't bother me a bit to get that all over my knife because it just helps preserve everything on the knife and then I will go to the other blade and start working on that on a pocket style knife okay force being the Naviance style blade like this butcher knife it's exactly the same thing you're going to register the bevel on the strop pull the blade towards you and push the blade away from you along the blade edge on the strop just like this and this is the same three dollar butcher knife that I've had forever

and now I'm just kind of cleaning up the face of the knife with the straw I'm not sharpening the blade now I'm cleaning up the face of this knife basically cleaning off the sides so I'm not registering the bevel at all I'll clean that off now I'll go back in register my bevel and sharpen the knife okay so the next question you would ask you is what if I don't have a strop and I'm in the woods is this flat paddle strop gonna be the best thing for my convex grind knife well no it's really not a strap type strop is going to be better for your convex grind knife in Reverse a strap type strop a leather strap type strop will eventually over time turn your Scandinavian grind into a convex grind so you have to use that sparingly to hone your knife only when you're in the woods and then use your paddle strop as soon as you get out of camp and back your house but you can use a strap style strop anytime on your convex grind blades so let's talk about that I've just taken a leather belt here wrapped it around a pole which could be a tree and I've got some compound here again this tormek compound for sweden but if I didn't have compound and I really needed compound in the woods because my blade was a little bit beyond just a plain dry straw then I could use any kind of clay-based mud because that's all this stuff really is is a clay based compound so I'm going to put a little bit of this on the strop again and rub it in and dress my straw on the rough interior side of my belt just like that and in this case I've got a Jeff white convex grind butcher style knife for that I'm going to use and I'm going to just put that on and you can see how that gives so it kind of wraps itself around that convex edge and that's why eventually doing this will turn a Scandinavian grind into a convex grind because it's gonna wrap like that and give which eventually is going to change the grind geometry of your Scandinavian grind but just register that thing as best you can and roll it into the strop it's the same thing here just kind of roll it into the strop you can go heavy on the first strokes and then lighter as you go just like this when you get done with that thing you're gonna have something that is absolutely the razor-sharp

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