Let's go hunting

Every now and then I get a hunting knife to do, or 3 and often, they are in rough shape.

I can sharpen a dull kitchen knife in 15-20 minutes but hunting knives are a different kettle of fish altogether, an hour at least is what I am looking at.
It's a stormy day here in Halifax so I thought I would take some work in progress shots and some final pictures of a very old and hunting knife with some serious damage to the edge. In fact, I think at one point the from 1.5 inches of this knife may have been serrated.

So here we go, a really cool little knife, I think this one has a very high carbon content, carbon is cool, I love carbon knives.

Very old but very loved knife, very dark in colour, scratched up (battle scars) and very dull.

Diamond Plates

The first step was to re-establish the bevels and edge. I used the Edge Pro Professional for this job, it excels on these type of knives. The one on the right is an Atoma 140 grit diamond stone, the larger one is a DMT extra course, 220 grit, these are specially cut to fit the Edge Pro and are fabulous at the heavy lifting portion of the sharpening process. While it is possible to get the knife sharp with these, my goal was to establish a new edge. I chose an angle of 20 degrees, and all the work was done at exactly 20 degrees from start to finish, 70 minutes later.

New Edge cut in, ready to move to the water stones.

Latte 400

Now the fun starts, the idea is to maintain a constant angle which the Edge Pro forces me to do, now with the Latte 400, a really nice stone, I can begin to remove the deep scratches left by the diamond plates. This will start the sharpening process too, I had marked the edge of the edge with a sharpie to ensure I was on target.

From the 400 Latte, I went to the Edge Pro 220 stone, it is just a matter of patience and constantly checking the scratch pattern. I wasn't just going for a sharp knife, I wanted a mirror like finish to really give it that pop. It's an enjoyable process watching the metal transform from it's original completely dull and severely scratched/damaged edge into what I hope it to be at the end.

The knife is sharp know, easily slicing telephone book paper, now to continue the refinement of the edge and move up in grit from the 140 to the exquisite Shapton Pro 15,000 grit stone.

Now I can see it becoming a much more refined edge, it is very sharp now and I could have stopped the process anytime, this is overkill but we love overkill. This is enjoyable. This knife deserves the attention.

15K Shapton, it doesn't get much better than this when talking Japanese Water Stones

(You can see all the stones I used here, 12 in total)

This is final stone in the process. 

It is hard taking pictures of the edge, the light doesn't do me any favours but you can see here that the bevel has a nice polish now. It looks like liquid in certain lighting conditions. 

After this, the final step was to strop the knife, I used a balsa strop laden with a diamond spray to put the final touch.

All done.

During the process, I put some dish soap, just a drop on the stones, it helps a little when trying  to achieve a mirror finish. This knife was sharpened at 20 degrees up to 15,000 grit and stropped with a 75,000 grit spray on balsa.  

I'm hoping the owner will be pleased.