Knife Care in the Field

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http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

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morning folks Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do this morning is we talk a little bit about field maintenance and sharpening of your tools specifically your knives I've done a couple videos as of late on knife handling knife safety knife use and I had a lot of questions about how do I keep my knife sharp in the field obviously if you're going to carve with them all the time especially using hardwood objects to make implements with you're going to dull your knife fairly quickly so I only carry a couple of things with me in the field to sharpen my knives now I want to get back to a base camp area or I'm back at my cabin where I live or something like that then I will use Japanese water stones of three different grits and I'll go through the motions of actually trying to put a razor blade edge on those knives again and then I will just continue to hone them in the wilderness so if you were off camping trekking hiking scouting whatever you're doing and you have to resharpen your knife for some reason you're really not sharpening that knife you're honing that knife and to hone your knife you don't need really complicated sets of water stones and things like that you can carry one small pretty fine grit water stone and a diamond rod and get away with everything that you're going to need in the field for even a pretty well extended amount of time you know out to thirty thirty days sixty days even more than that you really don't need to sharpen your knives very often you just need to keep them honed well after use so generally what I carry is I carry the Lansky's diamond rod and this is the old-style diamond rod we carry a Lansky's diamond rod on our website currently that's virtually the same thing this one's just in a brass tube and the new ones in a black tube but basically it has a diamond rod inside of it the other thing that this one has is a fishhook sharpener that I don't believe is on the new model either this will give you the ability to hone your edge very quickly and get it back to a fairly good sharpness it's probably not going to get it back to razor sharp but it's going to get it back sharp enough to do anything you need to do with it the other thing I generally carry as I carry a pretty fine grit it's like a 1200 grit whetstone and I got that thing in my water bottle right now soaking to soak up water but it's just an Arkansas whetstone that's made by case and I carry that in a tin box with my brass diamond rod and a couple of larger sail needles for doing repair work and things like that I believe in going places tool heavy at the same time if you don't have to carry everything with you and you can make handles and stands and implements and things like that to hold your tools with in the field then it enables you to lighten up your pack by only carrying a certain necessity items so I've gotten this stone but I don't have a stand for the stone I can make one of those very simply in the woods and I'm sure you saw that segment at the beginning of this video so what we're going to do here is we're going to start with our diamond rod and I've got a couple of knives out here that are ones that I abuse and beat up on all the time the first one is just this old three dollar butcher knife from a yard sale I use it all the time I beat it up continuously and the second one is just an old Mora SL one I've had this from the very beginning I used to wear this in a net carry a lot when I first started making videos this one's fairly dolled up so it needs a pretty good as put on it this one's still fairly sharp generally speaking when you look at a knife for sharpness I'll run it across my fingernail and if it skins nail off of there flat like that it's pretty sharp if you want to try to shave hairs off your arm with it that's your business I'll probably do that in this video but I don't make a habit of doing that in the field because just taking a chance on cutting yourself okay so let's start with the diamond rod and we'll start with this Mora knife and what we're going to do is we're going to extend that diamond rod completely out get our more knife in hand and I'm going to adjust this camera so you can see better what I'm doing and we'll get started okay one of the things that I really like about these diamond rods is that they have this collar on them and what that enables you to do is something that not a lot of people do which is sharpen toward the blade of your knife because that collar will keep you from catching your fingers so you can take this diamond rod and actually put my thumb right on the top of it in that groove where the fishhook is and I will just find my angle and you'll find the angle by how it bites you'll feel that diamond rod

biting into the metal and when it bites into the metal you know you've got the right angle and you just carry that angle the length of the blade just like this then I'll flip the blade over and I'll go on the other side remember that every time you run a stone or a rod or anything across this blade you're actually putting a burr to the other side so by going back and forth on both sides you're actually removing that burr and if your knife is not too dull and you're just honing your knife like you should be not really trying to sharpen it it shouldn't take a lot of pressure to do this once you find the right angle and it should only take 15 or 20 strokes at best and you'll be able to see on that blade where it's been sharpened and if you hold that blade in the sunlight and tilt it you'll see the area where you've sharpened that blade and you can see areas that you may have missed or areas that may be dull from the shine on that blade I can pretty much tell by feel and tell by looking right now I don't have my glasses on so I probably should put those on but that's probably enough strokes with the diamond rod to get this thing in a pretty well honed condition and then go to the fine stone okay at this point I'm ready to go through the finer stone and I just basically built myself a stand for this stone out of a piece of wood just to hold it from moving back and forth too much and I want to put my knife on that stone find that angle that I get a little bit of a bite and again the more you do this the more you're going to be able to tell get yourself on a pretty good level surface so your stones not wobbling around too much on you you can see I've got a little bit of an unlevel surface I'm working with here so bear with me

and it doesn't take a lot of pressure to do this if you're putting a lot of pressure on your knife when you're pushing down against the stone you're removing a lot of metal you really don't want to do that again you're just trying to hone this knife you're not sharpening this knife and you can go several strokes one direction several strokes the other direction if you want to to keep your grind even but I just like to go back and forth it seems to work better that way and again this is a whetstone so I've just soaked a stone in water I'm not using any oil to sharpen this knife and if the stone starts to dry out I'll dunk it back in the water I want that wetness on that stone because that's going to help with the sharpening process so I want that stone to stay nice and wet again I'm not putting a lot of pressure on this because I'm not trying to draw this knife into my hand or anything I'm just trying to maintain the angle as I go across here

you can see that shaving plenty of fingernail off that's a pretty sharp blade now I'm going to go to my other knife and work on it for a minute before I go to the final what I would do for this knife on the final honing process so I'm going to go ahead and grab the butcher knife out I'm going to hit it a few times with the diamond rod again you'll feel that rod bite into the metal and you're not trying to glide it along the metal you're using the length of the rod against the length of the blade and when you pull it across the stone it's the same thing you're moving the length of the blade down the length of the stone

okay that's grabbing really really good now we have taken care of our initial honing now we're going to drop our knife to knock off any final edge that might be on there and hone that edge to the best we can get it in the field before we protect it with something stay with me guys okay a lot of folks have asked me in videos lately why I wear the belt that I wear that's extra long and it's kind of a different kind of belt and what it is is it's a ring belt and I'm going to adjust this camera a little bit and it has one ring here that basically you tie the belt through almost like you would tie tie and ring belts have been around since medieval times the reason I like this belt so much is for several reasons everything that I wear has to be utilitarian with a belt like this I don't have a bunch of holes to have to worry about in here so if I've got to strap something together like a bundle of firewood or logs that I'm going to drag or even a deer that I'm dragging anything like that I can cinch this down it automatically makes that noose without having to mess around with any buckles or holes or anything like that it's extra long so that I've got extra length if I need it and I can also use this for a strop which we're going to do right now for the knives that we just sharpened on this beam just like this and we could use any down tree for this and we're going to use this area right here by holding this tight just drop our knife and the way you do that is you hold that piece of leather out and you run that knife away from the sharpened edge just like this so you're not cutting into the leather you're running away from the leather all you're trying to do with this

is knock that final edge offer there a lot of times you can do this and only this to bring the edge back on your knife if you haven't let it get too dull and you have a sharpened really well that should give you just about a spine of an edge as you're going to get on a knife in the field okay

let's have a look-see at this knife here see what we actually got here just find a spot here close if you can see that or not I assume that you can that's how easy it is to sharpen a knife in the field as long as you don't let it get too dull that thing will be hair popping shark okay so once we've got our knives to that razor sharp edge that we want what are we going to do to protect that blade obviously if we're carrying high carbon steel it has a tendency to rust with moisture so we've got to protect our blade there's two things that I generally carry with me in my pack that are very multifunctional that also work to protect my knives not only the blades but the wood one of them is I carry a small bottle this is like an ache and a K oil bottle from an ak-47 I cleaned it out burned it out with a torch to make sure that there was no residual cosmoline or oil in there and I filled it with vegetable oil this is 100% pure vegetable oil olive oil will work any type of a light oil will work but I don't like to use petroleum based type of oils I like to use vegetable nut oils olive oil things like that like I said then I can cook with this as well as you need to protect my knife and then I carry a cake of the fix and wax and if you don't have oil fixing wax will work just fine all by itself but fixing wax is a pretty thick coating I like to use it on my wood and my handles and I like to use oil on my knives if I can so basically all I'm going to do is take this oiler and dip it on my finger just like this and I'll get a puddle of it on my finger and I'll run that on the blade of my knife pushing away from the blade just like this not toward the blade I'll do the same thing on the other side again pushing away from the blade not into the blade go ahead and coat the back and then I would generally use fixing wax or oil either one on the handle

fixing wax for me seems to work really well for this stuff and what I'll generally do is I will get this thing coated with wax pretty good and then I will put it in the sheath to protect my hand on the blade like this and I'll rub that fixing wax in really really well just to kind of heat it up with my hand and get it impregnated in there very very well and that's all I'm going to do for that knife and I'm going to call that good and I would do the same thing with my sheath I would take that same fix and wax on my sheath rub it into my sheath and just palm it in there real good to heat it up just like this and that's going to impregnate that leather with that fix and wax and again this fixing wax is beeswax based and has some other proprietary components in a two it's made by my instructor Jeremy Janie sold at the Pathfinder school website I use it for just about everything imaginable but it works really really well as a leather and would protect it and then I'll do the same thing with the butcher knife and I'll call it good folks I'm Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me for another video here today I thank you for all your support in your views everything that you do for myself and all the other Pathfinder affiliates we'll be back another video as soon as we can thanks guys you