Find out how to sharpen a hook knife the right way, complete with a video tutorial that walks you through each step, a list of the items you'll need, and advice on how to maintain your tools sharp at all times.
How to sharpen a hook knife is one of the most common inquiries that I get on my feed whenever I publish photographs of spoon carving (you can find instructions on how to carve a wooden spoon on this page). To acquire a sharp blade, the first thing you need to do is gain an understanding of what characteristics constitute a sharp blade.
When sharpening a blade, you will be moving a burr back and forth between two surfaces to achieve the desired edge. Your blade will become sharper as this burr is worked back and forth on the sandpaper while the grit of the sandpaper is progressively reduced.
When it comes to carving spoons, having a carving knife that is in good shape is necessary, which is why I included that piece of advice in my post on the 21 questions that everybody has regarding spoon carving.
When Should You Sharpen Your Tools?
As a general rule, I sharpen all of my blades, whether they are chisels or plane blades, every fifteen minutes. This enables me to rapidly touch up the edge without having to remove large quantities of material. Because this portion of the knife has a hollow, I prefer to use hook blades for carving. Recently, I've begun forging my spoon blades (you can learn how to forge a spoon carving knife here), and I've adopted this characteristic.
Supplies Needed
• Multiple wooden dowels
• Sandpaper with a variety of grits (this is the ideal assortment of sandpaper),
• Spray adhesive or staples, whichever you like.
• The stropping paste (and stropping)
• Belt grinder - optional
To sharpen anything, you must begin with low-grit sandpaper and gradually increase the grit, making the burr smaller and smaller as the object becomes sharpened.
I have a collection of small dowel rods to which I have stapled or glued various grits of wet-dry sandpaper.
You can either staple or glue them, depending on your level of urgency. You then advance to 1000 stones and, upon acquiring this wire timber, to 2000 or 4000 gritstones. This burr becomes even smaller, and the bevel and rear of the blade are continually sharpened.
How To Sharpen a Hook Knife
It is really simple to sharpen the hook knife because it has a hollow grind, which allows my sandpaper dowel to register on two spots simultaneously during the process. I just keep moving ahead along both points until I've created a burr on the other edge of the board.
The process of sharpening a blade consists solely of moving a burr or an excess of metal back and forth along the edge of the blade. I'm going to sharpen one edge until I can feel a burr on that side across the blade's edge. After that, I'll move on to the other edge. And once I've located a burr, the next step is to remove it; to do this, I simply take my strop and slide it along the edge in a very deliberate manner. This removes the burr.
I am continuously focusing on improving my push stroke while keeping a close eye on my form. As I move along, I am turning the knife and applying pressure with the strop.
If I was sharpening with a piece of sandpaper of lesser quality, and the burr that I was trying to remove wasn't a tiny little burr, but rather a larger burr because I was removing a nick or something else, then I would build a sandpaper strop to perform the same thing that I was trying to do.
SHARPIE HINT
If you are concerned that you are not carrying out the procedure correctly, you should get a sharpie and cover the whole edge of the hook knife in black. Then proceed to refine it more.
When the sharpie is removed from the edge along the entire area of the blade, you'll know that you've covered the entire blade because it will be visible. Take a grit that is a step higher, and polish the edge a little bit further.
If you can detect a burr along the entire edge, proceed to step two of this process and grab the sandpaper with the next highest grit.
Your edge will maintain its sharpness for a longer period if you use finer grit. You don't have to go completely overboard with all of this; you can stop at approximately 600 grits, and you should be fine to go.
HOOK KNIFE SHARPENING WITHOUT A HOLLOW GRIND
Imagine that your hook knife does not have a hollow grind like the Mora knives that I demonstrate in the video that is above. A hollow-ground hook knife can be sharpened in the same manner as any other type of hook knife. However, a significant number of hook knives tend to be manufactured with an extremely acute bevel. This necessitates that the user approaches the spoon at such an extreme angle that it is impossible to cut particularly high quality if it is even possible to cut all. This is especially challenging in both dry and green woodland environments.
When it comes to the angles at which you can cut, you have a great deal of leeway, and the quality of the end product does not suffer as a result. If, on the other hand, you have the time, patience, and a few tools necessary to complete the task, repairing a Mora knife is rather simple.
My WORKPRO knives were brought back to a razor's edge in record time and with no effort thanks to the use of a belt grinder. To make it simpler to approach your spoon from a viable angle, simply take the bevel, grind it back into the blade, and blend it back in.
Because this angle enables you to use the piece of wood as a support system, rather than simply trying to scoop out an enormous amount of material, it is superior to any other angle that can be used for this purpose. When it comes to carving a spoon, taking your time and working steadily is the way to go.
