Early Morning Activity

I got up early this morning to enjoy the relative silence before the rest of the household wakes up.

While my coffee was brewing I decided to do a little maintenance on my axe after working it all weekend. (Yes, axe sharpening and cleaning in the wee hours of the morning.)

I've got this sharpening routine down to a pretty quick and dirty process and it works for every knife I'm currently using except for the Scandi-Ground edges.

I have the EMS system from JRE loaded with a piece of 325-grit paper that has been used enough that it's probably pretty fine by now. I take 5-10 passes on each side of the blade dry and then repeat the process after spraying a bit of WD40 on the blade.

From there I go straight to the loaded strop and do 5-10 passes on black compound before wiping down the blade and putting it away.

That's it.

The coarser paper makes quick work of sharpening but it's not so coarse that it's removing excessive amounts of steel and shortening the life of the tool. The strop then cleans up and polishes that toothy edge and more stropping means a smoother edge.

I had read somewhere that Wayne Goddard does a sharpening demonstration using nothing but a 325-grit stone from Norton and a strop to sharpen so that's what I'm attempting and so far I've been pleased with the results.

Now I can obsess over my edge-finish with the best of them and will on certain knives but the one-grit, one-strop method is really working well for me right now and I'll stick with it for a while.

Thanks for reading,


B