This is the little guide that I use to sharpen
my knives with the final bevel.
It adjusts from 10 degrees to 45 degrees.
I am going to sharpen this knife at 20 degrees.
If you want to adjust it you loosen the nut
and move the guide.
It slips on the 1" x 42" sander.
I start out with a 150 grit belt.
I pickup this sander on craigslist for $100.00.
This is the sander I used to make knives with.
Then as I learned more I decided I wanted
to keep making knives and so I built a 2"
x 72" belt sander.
I am going to sharpen this knife.
Now I change to 320 grit belt.
With this system I can take a knife from no
secondary bevel at all to razor sharp in about
5 minutes.
Once you get the bevel started it does not
take too much to get the wire edge down.
Now I will put on the 600 grit belt.
I have used these two 320 and 600 grit belts
for a lot of knives.
More than 40 knives so far.
They do not wear much because you are not
removing very much material.
Now the knife is a 600 grit finish.
This is a trick that I saw on the channel
of a cutlery maker.
He would take his knife and draw it lightly
across a piece of wood.
This action would knock off any wire burr
from the edge and get down to a clean cutting
edge.
This knife is really sharp right now and all
we did was run it for a couple of seconds
of the belts.
That is just 600 grit right there.
We are going to take it up higher.
We are going to polish the edge with this
leather belt.
So now I remove the guide.
The leather belt is from surgi-sharp.
It has a little polishing compound on it.
It does not require very much compound.
Now I am going to strop.
these are the same steps you would use when
doing it by hand but this is just a lot faster
for someone like me that is making lots of
knives and does not want to spend an hour
on each blade just to put the edge on it when
I could get the same results in just a couple
of minutes.
Now this is really going to be sharp.
There is nothing left there it took every
hair right off with hardly any pressure.
Let's check it out on a newspaper.
There is two layers here.
That was just a few minutes of sharpening.
I can recommend that if you have a sander
to go ahead and get a leather belt and a couple
of these finer grit ones.
