Thursday 15 February 2018

Sharpening a spoon carving hook knife.


A very quick post showing a technique for keeping your trusty hook knife in good sharp working order.
You need two things, both shown in the video below.
The first is a flat strop, good quality leather glued to a flat board.
A dowel strop, leather glued or tied around a suitable diameter dowel.
Add to this some polishing compound or chrome cleaner applied to the leather.
In the case of chrome cleaner please let it dry before use.
That's about all.
You will need to pass the board strop over the bevel in parallel with the cutting edge, don't run the strop past parallel as you will round the cutting edge. The important strop is on the internal part of the hook. Keep the strop flat against the internal bevel and again parallel with the cutting edge.
Earlier in this blog you'll find a tutorial about how to sharpen a hook with stones, but you don't really need this.
Practice the technique shown in the video and your hook knife should cut like a laser...



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