Tool Sharpening Basics

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Fasten your rough stone in place. Hold your knife with two hands, one hand on the handle and the other supporting the blade (thumb on the blunt back edge). Hold the blade at a slight—not steep—angle (the magic number is 20°, but who's measuring?), and push the blade along the stone as if you were trying to cut a slice out of its surface (Fig. 13). Sound easy? It's not.

You want to sharpen the whole edge of the blade with every stroke, so you've got to move the blade diagonally as you push it forward so its tip will make contact with the stone before you reach the end of the stroke (Fig. 14)—that's why you want a good-sized honing stone. You'll also have to lift up on the handle of the blade a bit as you get to the tip, or that curved edge won't really meet the stone (Fig. 15). And—most important of all—you've got to keep the same angle on the blade with each and every stroke. That's the real problem.

Listen to Robert Parrish: "It'll take an hour for the average person to sharpen a pocketknife—and it still won't be really sharp. Do the job right and you'll get a good edge in five minutes. Ninety-nine percent of the problem is in the angle." If you keep changing the angle as you work (ever so slightly, ever so unintentionally), you'll keep hitting edge to stone at different points and, in effect, rounding off the edge of the blade, making it dull instead of sharp. It sure happened to me.

Parrish gave me a good one-on-one lesson, went off to help a customer, came back and found I'd made my pocketknife duller instead of sharper. I figured R.P. had more important things to do than watch me mess up, so I went home to do what he (and all the other experts I talked to) emphasized: Practice. (It helped.) Some other tips: Hold that thumb backstop on the blade so the side of it touches the stone while the middle of it holds the blade at the angle you want. Sharpen by pivoting your body at the waist so you'll have your wrists and elbows locked. And you can, if you'd rather, do your rough honing by moving sections of the blade round and round in a circular motion. Underhill figures that makes it easier to keep the correct angle because you're not repeatedly lifting the blade off the stone.

If you're getting frustrated or just want to make the whole job go a lot easier, get a sharpening guide—a little blade clamp that automatically holds your knife at the right angle (Fig. 16). Buck Knives makes one, called the Honemaster, and Juranitch offers the Razor Edge Knife Sharpening Guide. Let me tell you, unlike many sharpening gimmicks, these two doodads work. You may just want to use them as training wheels, but beard-axer Juranitch claims no expert can "freehand" a knife edge as well as an amateur with a guide can.

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