Thread: Sharpening using a Wetstone

Paint the bevel with black felt marker so you can watch what's happening.
Sharpen from your knees, not your elbows.

Pull strokes only, no scrubbing. Gentle pressure.
Pull stroke then stop. Lift straight up and back to the start.
Straight down then pull stroke again.

How many grit grades do you go through for a typical edge?

My wet stone has two sides.

One with 1000 grit and the other 6000 grit

1,000 might not get you far enough, fast enough.
If the edge is at all banged up, you will need to somehow grind behind that then restore the carving edge.

I use a 10X magnifier and look for bright reflections in a bright LED light from little dents in the edge.

Bad: I begin on 600. Keep looking under the light to watch the bent bits get worn away by the abrasive.
Pretty good: 800 start
Then 1,000, then 1200, then 1500 then hone with CrOx/AlOx. Use your 6K stone instead here.
Most of the timer, the last honing step is all I need to do.

I'm satisfied with 3M wet&dry silicon carbide fine automotive sandpapers for all the grits.
Tack down a strip, say, 1/3 of a sheet is good enough.

I carve mostly with the crooked knives and adzes common to the First Nations carvers here in the Pacific Northwest.
I don't use gouges very much any more so I don't make much use of water stones or diamond plates.
That means all the abrasives are wrapped around rods of various sizes. The tool is steady, the abrasive moves.

You'll get it. Pick a bevel angle to stick with and practice. That black marker helps a lot.

if your stone is a waterstone, you'll pull (unless it's a very hard waterstone - but there aren't many that will tolerate pressure and a push bevel).

Pushing or pulling doesn't matter that much as long as the edge is finished and if there is a burr, the burr is addressed.

You have only two things to be concerned with - what is the geometry that you're going for (and are you establishing it and re-establishing it when needed vs. just rubbing metal that may not be what you want to rub), and item 2 is making sure your final finish as at the edge and not just rubbed on some steel near the edge.

Some form of magnification is also helpful to see what is happening at the very edge.

There's some good advice above, but something quite important that no one's mentioned is this...

What you describe initially isn't correct, because you need to think about it differently than 'pull' or 'push' strokes. If the knife is facing toward you and you apply pressure when pulling - that's an 'edge leading' stroke - the same motions as if you were trying to shave a sliver off the stone. If the knife is facing away from you and you apply pressure when pulling - that's an 'edge trailing' stroke - the edge is being drawn backwards across the stone, rather than going into it. Does that make sense?

Assuming you're holding the knife in your right hand, then in the scenario you describe above you'll be getting exclusively edge-leading strokes on the right hand side of the edge, and exclusively edge-trailing on the left hand side.

Now you can use either e-l or e-t, or what most people do, which is mix it up a bit. But you should do them evenly as they do slightly different things. E-t strokes will raise a burr more quickly, and are more easy to control if you're starting out. E-l strokes are better for de-burring.

General good advice might be to use a mixture of the two focusing more on e-t at the start, and e-l toward the end. And deburring with a couple of light pressure e-l passes on each side.

Hope that helps, and is understandable!

Oh and - I suspect it sounds like you have a King 1k/6k combi...?

As Neil said, you might find that 1000 grit isn't low enough if your knife is a bit beaten up. If it's in good shape then it'd be grand. On that stone I would do the majority of the sharpening on the 1k side and then use the 6k side with a few edge-leading strokes to make sure the knife is deburred properly.

If it is a King stone - they are muddy, and dish quite easily, so will need flattening from time to time. They are also improved the longer you soak them. I leave my Kings constantly submerged in a bucket of water.

So I missed one possibly quite important word in your post above (which probably should have dawned on me considering the nature of this forum, duh!): 'woodcarving'.

What I wrote above would relate to pocket knives and kitchen knives. I don't know about carving knives, so possibly ignore everything I said!

"Carving knives" are very specifically meant for particular styles of wood carving.

About 1/2 of my tools are the usual western style of gouges with mallets and so forth.

The other half are the crooked knives and the elbow and D adzes that you see First Nations
carve totem poles, masks and dishes here in the Pacific Northwest. Very versatile.

I do need to use some short and straight knives from time to time. Your sharpening observations apply.
Otherwise, I have come up to need even a tennis ball as a practical strop.

Ah yes, I can imagine that some of the more specialist types/shapes require some different more ‘creative’ sharpening methods.

Good to know though that I didn’t type all that out for nothing or potentially lead people astray. And that the same principles apply for straighter-edged woodcarving knives.

The principles are the same. Kitchen prep knife, cleaver, $100 adze blade, 9/15 gouge, they are all the same.
Maybe the tool moves, maybe the abrasive moves, all the same.
I roll a 5/35 gouge on a flat water stone = same as a good kitchen straight blade.

To me, the key thing was to learn to do freehand sharpening very well. I take pride in being very good at it.