Knife Stropping – Possibly The Best Way To Sharpen Your Knife

Sevelx | February 15, 2016 | General

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Razor sharp blades by hand… Your Great Grandaddy did it… so can you. And I’m gonna to show you how! So pull up your favorite chair and gather in close as I show you how to put the finishing touch on your blades – taking them from “sharp” to “razor sharp”, and before we’re all done, I’m even gonna show you how to make and use your own leather strop.

What You’re Going to Need

*Your knife.
*Any kind of scrap wood for the base of your strop. The main thing is that you need something that is thick enough so that when you are stropping, your hand doesn’t scrape against the table. Something smaller could be more like a hand-held field strop that you could throw into your bug-out bag or something like that.
*Some sort of leather. I’m using a piece from a random leather-tooling kit….but if you don’t have a whole lot of access to leather, you could use something like an old tool pouch or the back of a glove.
*5-minute epoxy.
*Something to stir the epoxy with.
*A razor blade.
*Honing compound.

………..

Stropping Maneuvers

To strop, basically we’re going to go back and forth, alternating sides of your knife, pulling it towards you with the blade facing away from the direction you’re pulling. And you can feel when there’s just a hair of resistance on the strop, and there’s a little amplified sound that comes off of there; a little bit of a scratching sound.

One of the ways I test the sharpness is just relative sharpness. You take a razor blade and make a cut down a piece of paper, and you can see how well that blade went through the paper. Do the same thing with your knife. Then you just compare the look of your knife cut to your razor blade cut, and when they are about the same, you know your knife is approaching “razor sharp”.