Why Your Knives Won't Stay Sharp

today I hope to answer the question why do our knives go dull so fast here's a myth that a lot of people tell themselves my knife isn't sharp I must need finer sharpening grits but the truth is most of us are over sharpening our knives it sounds crazy right today I'm going to show you how I get my knives as sharp as I want them to be and how you can too with just a couple of tweaks to how you sharpen so what are we doing wrong well most people think that their knife should be able to do three things if it's been sharpened correctly cut through paper like this sliced tomatoes one-handed super thin so you can see through them and three if it's really sharp it should be able to shave the hair right off of your arm and now in the real world though if you're doing these things on a daily basis you're probably a weirdo the first step is to decide what you're using your knife for the most there are four different basic Edge types and picking the right one is critical and because of science we're going to show you what they look like under a microscope as we go along the first Edge type is a working Edge and it's for boxes or twice or rope or zip ties you might actually be over sharpening your knife if you're doing these types of tasks on a daily basis or you might want an outdoor Edge which is better for processing animals or doing Camp craft tasks or maybe you need a good Edge for your kitchen blades so that you can slice food well and the fourth type is a good high polish Edge which is great for just showing off so to demonstrate some of these Concepts today I am using a sharpener from Wicked Edge called the we66 obsidian and I absolutely love this knife sharpener they are sponsoring this video I just really appreciate how easy it is to use this system and the results that I get from it so of course I'm going to tell you it's awesome because it is so if you're using a knife mostly for opening boxes cutting through tape plastic wrap zip ties cutting up cardboard then you probably want to do what's called a working Edge on your knife so wicked Edge makes these awesome handles that have the Grits built into them and to get this particular Edge on a knife you might need to go down as far as 2 100 to work out any Nicks if you've hit some rocks or some metal with your knife and there's some Nicks in it you would work those out with 200 then proceed to 600 800 and then finish the knife with a thousand grit um since this knife is not all that bad I'm gonna start off with 800 and then hit it with a thousand to finish it off so to make sure I got my angle set right I'm gonna actually put a little bit of ink along the blade of the knife and then set my angle appropriately so that when I make a pass with the stones it removes all of the ink right up to the very apex of the blade in this way I know that I have the knife exactly dialed in on the sharpener and I can note what numbers on the dial for next time to make set up really fast so going up to a thousand grit will actually give you micro serrations on the blade itself which means just like little teeth that helps grip into those materials like tape and plastic and cardboard it's a nice durable Edge for those kinds of tasks and it's easy and quick to touch it up whenever you need to so that's how you get a nice durable working Edge on this knife as you can see under the scope there's some really nice micro serrations right there that helps it really grip into the material now if what you're after is a kitchen knife that's going to perform really well something that has enough toothiness to cut into gristle on meat or to cut through vegetables but also be refined enough for herbs or fish then what we want to do is get to a 1500 grit level of sharpening so this knife was used a lot with pull through sharpeners which gave it some Nicks and scratches so I took it from 200 to 600 so now I'm going to do about 20 passes at 800. so most kitchen knives tend to be made from very hard steel so using a higher grit Stone will actually help prevent it from chipping out each time I step to a finer Grid it's working out all of those scratches from the previous grit and refining The Edge even more and now I'll do about 20 passes with a thousand grit it's not just about sharpness of a knife it's also about the edge retention or the durability of the edge so getting the pairing of the knife and what you're using it for and the stones and the grit that you're ending with really makes a big difference as to how long the edge is going to class I've been sharpening knives for the better part of 30 years and this is the most fun I've ever had sharpening on a system ever and there you go a wicked sharp kitchen knife in just a few minutes and I know that this is going to hold up and it's gonna be really really nice in the kitchen so for a Great Outdoor Edge what you want to have is a little bit of toothiness in the edge but you want to have the bevel slightly rounded and Polished from strapping this will give you a very durable Edge for bushcrafting and outdoor tasks if you're going to be doing a lot of hunting and fishing you'll want to take your Edge to about a thousand grit and then finish it off with a strop rounding over that bevel just a little bit and polishing it if you're going to be doing a lot of bushcrafting tasks where there's a lot of wood carving involved you could take it up to a 1500 grit use a six Micron lapping film and then use the four and two Micron strops to finish off the blade and make it really really nice for wood crafting and that is exactly what I'm gonna do so since my knife was not terribly dull I hit it with the Thousand grit now I'm going to go up to the 1500 grit and do about about 20 passes on that so with the six Micron lapping film on these glass platens I'm ready to take the scratches out of this knife you want to make sure that before you start you want to wipe down the edge of your knife to get some of that residual grit so it doesn't get stuck in the lapping film and keep scratching your knife at that grit level does that make sense be careful when you're wiping off the blade to make sure your fingers are below the edge so I'm going up and away from the edge so I don't cut the lapping film and just about 20 passes on this knife and I'm already seeing a really nice mirror edge starting to develop which is really cool so one thing that's super important is actually cleaning your blade off before you do any stropping because you don't want any of that grit that's left over contaminating The Edge and keep scratching it so you want to use uh rubbing alcohol and just very carefully clean off your blade so that none of that gets contaminated I'm gonna start with the four Micron and then move to the two Micron and finish it off and I'm actually going to bring this I'm going to bring my angle in just a little bit so that I'm not rounding over that edge I just worked so hard on I'm gonna do up and away so it doesn't cut into the straw this Emulsion is actually suspended Diamond particles so you're putting Diamond particles into these leather straps and that's what's doing the polishing work on the blade once you've done your strapping with four microns then you want to clean off the blade really well and proceed to two microns we don't want any cross contamination between grits so we want to do a really nice job of cleaning off the blade before we proceed further now I'm ready for the two Micron emulsions dropping same process Up and Away The Edge is so beautiful on this knife and it is insanely sharp the thing is is it's so fast to do this once you have your settings figured out just touching up your knife and getting it to this level of sharpness is so quick as you can see under the scope it's just got a beautiful smooth refined finish this is going to hold up really well for bushcrafting tasks for wood carving for processing animals this is going to be an excellent finish just seeing the light fly off of that edge is so cool it's very addicting because I can't resist it's so fun so I went from 200 to 600 to 800 to 1000 to 1500 use the six Micron lapping film and then went to the four Micron Emulsion on the shrops then the two Micron Emulsion on the drops that is how I got this incredible Outdoor Edge on this knife I've had this knife since 1997. it has never been this sharp and sometimes with your knives you just want the edge to look insanely nice super high polish absolutely gorgeous and this is how you do that I recently picked up the new Benchmade tagged out but the knife edge doesn't look as nice as I know it could be so we're gonna fix that since this knife is very new it doesn't have any scratches or anything in it so I'm not going to start all the way back at 200 grit but I am confident that with this setup if I was to wreck the edge with 200 grit and work my way all the way up that I could probably do it in about 30 minutes I went over the blade with about 20 passes at 1500 grit now I'm going to switch to the 6 Micron lapping films so these films are really easy to apply there's actually a piece of glass that's embedded into these handles and all you got to do is just peel these off like a sticker and stick them out of the glass the really important thing to remember when you're working with these really high grits in the Micron level is cleanliness you want to make sure that you're using rubbing alcohol wiping down the blade wiping down your fingers so you don't get any stray thousand grit particles working their way into the Emulsion and just keep re-scratching that blade when you're trying to get a mirror finish you have to be very clean so with these laughing films you can actually scrub them against the blade in a horizontal fashion to actually polish them out so these six Micron lapping films will actually very quickly eliminate those 1500 grit streaks in the blade all right we're done with the six Micron lapping films we can now move on to stropping you want to actually back off on your angle a little bit because that leather that's in those drops is going to conform to the blade a little bit and round it just enough on that bevel and what that does is it actually wears away the metal on the on the bevel and makes it nice and round and smooth so it's a smooth transition that will make a very high polished Edge but also an edge that is very strong all right at four microns it's already just shining like the sun off of this Edge I'm gonna put a little two Micron Emulsion on these drops and there we go an absolutely perfect mirror finish on this edge of the blade it is incredible this thing looks gorgeous could not ask for a more beautiful Edge than this it is so pretty so that's how you make a knife really look like a show knife so we went from 1000 grit to 1500 grit then we did a six Micron lapping film then a four Micron and a two Micron strop then we did a one micron lapping film to make this thing absolutely shine because a high polished blade like this doesn't perform very well I'm actually going to put a micro bevel on it I'm going to increase the angle a little bit go back to the 1500 grit stones and just do a few passes with that just to touch up that very very apex of the blade make it useful again so I'm going to put three degrees more on the sharpener on each side and then just hit that very very edge with 1500 Grit just to bring back some of the usefulness of this knife while keeping that beautiful Edge there that we've created and as you can see under the scope absolutely beautiful so again I'm using this wicked Edge sharpener but these concepts are the same for any stones for any strops you can use the same sort of approach this system just guarantees that the angle is going to be perfect every time you can get the edge that you want on your knife and make it really durable you just have to figure out what you're going to use your knife for select the Grits that you need to get that edge and then be patient and methodical in getting that edge you can do it by hand with a stone it takes a lot of skill it takes some dexterity if you do have the opportunity at some point to get one of these sharpeners I highly recommend it because it really is easy Once you set it up and you learn the basics check out the link in my description for this sharpener you can use this discount code I hope you found that useful or at least entertaining we'll see you later foreign