Maintaining Your Edge

If you have been around knives for very long at all, you know that keeping the edge sharp requires a bit of skill.  It is often said that a dull knife will cut you quicker than a sharp one because it takes more effort to push, pull or slice and then the blade slips off the material and cuts you!  A sharp blade will cut through various materials with much more ease and will allow you to finely control the cut.  Sharpening and honing is something you need to learn how to do!  I consider this to be one of the many lost skills that our forefathers knew well.

If your knife is a good grade of steel, you should be able to sharpen it once and then merely hone the blade after that.  (Unless of course you hit something hard and chip out the blade, then you will have to file or grind out the chipped section)  Honing a blade means you don’t wait until the blade is really dull before you try to sharpen it.  This is where most people make their mistake.  As a side note, it really amazes me how dull most kitchen knives are!  Of course, most of them are made out of really cheap grades of stainless steel with so much Chromium in it that while it pretty much never rusts, it also is hard to sharpen and will not keep a good edge for very long.

You can hone a blade using a very fine stone of 2000 to 3000 grit, laying the knife on the stone at the angle of the blade edge and then using the same number of strokes per side, first toward you and then away from you.  The stone needs to be on a flat, level surface and must be immobilized to that it doesn’t scoot around.  Some stones come set in a block of wood with rubber feet or you may make your own using a board and some nails or screws in which to set the stone.  The stone should be lubricated with either water or oil, don’t use a dry stone!  I recommend using only water, as once you put oil on a stone, you can’t go back to using water on it.  And, if you are using it in the outdoors, oil may be hard to come by, but water is generally more available (You can even use saliva if you need to) Also using oil on your stone tends to clog up the pores of the stone and it will eventually lose it’s ability to grind.  Just remember that every time you sharpen or hone a blade you are grinding away the blade material.  So use the finest grit you can to bring back the keen edge.

When do you hone a blade?  When the blade is no longer shaving sharp and it is getting harder to do fine carving tasks or slice materials, then you need to hone it.  After honing it you should strop it to polish the edge and get rid of the fine burrs or the tiny wire-like piece of metal left on the edge after honing on a stone.  You can strop it using leather (which is why some bushcrafters wear a leather belt) or you can strop it on cardboard or if you’re really on the edge of things, you can even strop it in the palm of your hand! (Requires some practice but it is doable!)  Keeping your edge sharp is a skill you definitely want to own.

As a Christian, we want to maintain a keen edge on our soul as well.  As we live our lives, the daily grind of things can make us dull spiritually.  We become more insensitive to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Bible can become boring and our prayer life may  become almost non-existent, our church attendance begins to slip and we are no longer such a cheerful giver when it comes to our Tithe!  Then we tend to become more and more like the darkness of the world around us instead of being the light.  This is the very definition of worldliness.  Becoming like the world instead of like Christ.  This is also, for many people, the beginning of backsliding away from God and losing the ground you have gained in your spiritual growth. Let us never get dull toward God, but rather maintain our spiritual edge.  This happens by not letting yourself get dull in the first place by regular honing and stropping through Bible study, prayer, regular church attendance, faithful tithing etc.  Are you maintaining your edge?

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PS. We have just added a Facebook Page – WayPoint Survival.  Look us up and send a friend request!  You can also check out my other websites where you can set up training for many of these skills at www.waypointsurvival.com and look at and order my custom knives at www.benderknifeworks.com.

James B