Strop your Knife – easy as 1 2 3

Why Strop Your knife?

Honey Badger Knives come really sharp right out of the box. Strop your knife to get the edge even more refined.

We have written a number of articles about how to maintain the edge of your Honey Badger Knife.

By far the easiest way to keep your knives sharp is to strop your knife. If you don’t let your knife get too dull then a couple of passes over a strop will bring a shaving sharp edge right back.

A Strop is used as a final step in sharpening to refine and polish and to make sure there is no wire edge. A strop is also used in-between sharpening to bring an edge back as it removes much less material than a full resharpen does. You then end up with a stronger, more refined, smoother edge and the blade lasts much longer since less steel is abraded off. While it may take a bit of practice to get proficient, you cannot do any major damage to the blade by stropping. The only trick is to be able to hold at a relatively steady angle as you draw the knife, edge trailing, from base to tip along the strop. The angle can be slightly adjusted up or down until you are sure that the whole bevel has gotten the same amount of polish. Attention does need to be paid to not applying too much pressure or raising the angle up too high, as both can result in rolling the edge. It wont take long to learn how to strop your knife, it’s a lot easier than it sounds. There are many YouTube videos explaining the process here is one from our friends at Worksharp Tools.

While it may take a bit of practice to get proficient, you cannot do any major damage to the blade by stropping. The only trick is to be able to hold at a relatively steady angle as you draw the knife, edge trailing, from base to tip along the strop. The angle can be slightly adjusted up or down until you are sure that the whole bevel has gotten the same amount of polish. Attention does need to be paid to not applying too much pressure or raising the angle up too high, as both can result in rolling the edge.

How to make your own strop

What strop should I use?

We connected with Chris Edwards who has has been making strops for a number of years. Chris is very well know on many of the knife related Facebook groups and he has a great reputation for making quality products. Chris sent us his 3 most popular strops. These are 1.5″ x 10″ leather strips glued onto wooden bases. Each strop covered in a different compound. They were mailed priority mail and arrived well packaged in just couple of days.

How to strop your knife.

Assuming that you are starting with a blunt blade.

1. First sharpen your knife by raising a bur, full length both sides using your preferred method
2. Strop your knife. Pull the blade, edge trailing (ie. not trying to cut into the strop) on the strop with medium to light pressure to finish the edge
3. Do this several times on both sides
4. An optional step is to run the edge along the bottom edge of the wood base of the strop, like you are trying to cut into it 90* to deburr or remove any “wire” that may be left.
5. Then make a few more passes on the strop with lighter strokes. This may be repeated depending on how the edge is reacting, but it usually does not take too much to get a crispy sharp polished edge. A full bevel polish will take a bit longer but is a a sign of where the edge is finished and refined to.

If your blade is already relatively sharp then you can skip step 1 and just start at step 2 beginning with the white strop.

What sharpener should I use?

This set of 3 strops from Chris are marked on the back, White (W) is most “coarse” but will still clean up the edge very nicely, the Green (G) is a good medium compound if you would like to refine the edge further and the Polish (P) is for finishing and polishing. As with all sharpening progression don’t go to the next level of refinement until you are satisfied with the previous level. A strop will not sharpen a blunt blade but will restore the edge on a knife that’s become a little dull. If your knife comes off your sharpener being able to slice paper albeit a little rough, then doing the white, green, polish progression mentioned here will smooth it right out.

We always have a strop out on the kitchen counter and no knife goes back in the drawer or in the pocket without a couple of passes on the strop. Doing this we find that our knives only need a proper sharpen if for example the edge has taken a bit of a ding onto a hard surface or run into a staple while breaking down a box.

Chris offers great advice to his customers, specially those who are first time stroppers (is that actually a real word?). To order your own strops you can get hold of Chris by emailing him here tcedwards@hotmail.com or by sending him a message via Facebook here

And always remember to strop your knife!