Looking Glass Bevels/Edge

    Hi all,

      Often, when folks bring me a folder to sharpen I will ask if they want a highly polished finish or not and most of the time the answer is yes. So when I tackle this job I usually take out the Edge Pro Professional which excels at this type of thing. However, this time I did it freehand with full sized stones.

    The way I do this is to first and foremost make the knife sharp on the very first stone and in this case I used a Naniwa Chosera 400. The secret is to reduce the depth of the scratches as much as possible on each stone. You can't do a half assed job on the coarse stone and then hope the 5k stone will do the trick. So I spend a lot of time on the 400 stone and I use at least four levels of pressure on that stone. The idea is to just keep reducing the depth of the scratches in the bevels with ever diminishing levels of pressure and water to keep everything nice and clean, no grit debris.

   Once I am happy with the first stone and the knife is sharp I move to the 1,000 and repeat the process but with less pressure. I'm not forming a burr, I am just refining and polishing. The polished bevels will really start to show at the 3,000 grit level. In this case I used Naniwa Chosera including the 10,000 grit stone to finish it off.

  Of course this polish won't last long out in the field but it does look nice and is exceptionally sharp.

  In terms of stones required, I think you need at least 3,000 to 4,000 grit but the 2,000 Naniwa Aotoshi (green brick) is a fantastic polishing stone.


At the end of the day, this type of finish is not that important, getting a nice strong and sharp edge takes priority, every time so don't think this is something  that you need to be able to do. I've screwed this up lots of times, believe me :)

Peter