Swivel Knife Help

[King's X]

Spend $15 bucks and buy a Barry King blade to fit your Tandy Craftool knife. In the mean time, head over to Leather Wrangler's website and check out Paul's video or tutorial on sharpening a swivel knife blade. There way too many things that could be going wrong to try and diagnose without seeing what you are doing. Unless you are dealing with a flat blade or one with a chip in the cutting surface the coarse is way to aggressive to use out of the gate. My lowest size stone is 600 grit and I go up to 8000.

Good luck!

[charlescrawford]

So I went over to our local knife shop at our mall today and the owner is going to sharpen my blades. I even learned how to properly strop using my tandy jig. I was using the whole strop going forward one end to the other then backwards end to end. He told me just to go backwards that you never go forwards when stropping.

I even found the Saral paper at our small Podunk JoAnn Fabrics. They only had the sample packs but it has enough paper to last a while and you can reuse it several times which my wallet likes. The sample pack ran $7.99 and has 5 sheets of 4 different types.

I also got a 1/4 inch Filigree blade in today's mail from tandy that was pre sharpened now I know what swivel knives are suppose to feel and cut like. I am going to buy some more blades from the king website later in the week that someone linked to above. I see from the site that for each size there is a "thick" and a "thin" listed does this refer to how thick the cut is? Like a thin cuts a thin path where a thick cuts a much wider path? That is the first site I have seen the thick and thin blades. The only thing I don't get is how one blade runs $8.00 in shipping.

[Sylvia]

Charles: One of the best pieces of advise I ever got on here was when someone told me to use a felt tip pen and darken the edges of my blades before I attempt to sharpen. This little bit of info shows immediately what your problem is, especially if you are getting the angle off. If your angle is off... you are not sharpening... no matter how many strokes you do. Also this may seem intuitive for some but it needs to be said. "Push to sharpen, pull to strop"

Regarding"thick/thin blades... that refers to the thickness of the blade itself. I prefer a thinner blade for most things.

[charlescrawford]

Sylvia

Thanks for the tip. When I dropped the blades off to be sharpened he measured the angles and said he had butter knives sharper then my blades.

So I see on YouTube guys using a swivel knife that looks to cut a wider swath then others how are they doing that? Is it a special kind of blade?

[electrathon]

Sylvia

Thanks for the tip. When I dropped the blades off to be sharpened he measured the angles and said he had butter knives sharper then my blades.

So I see on YouTube guys using a swivel knife that looks to cut a wider swath then others how are they doing that? Is it a special kind of blade?

Wider blades cut a wider V in the leather. Thick leather helps too.

[immiketoo]

Charles, everyone here has given great advice. One other thing is that Bruce is a MASTER leather carver. Of course its going to look effortless. Carve for about 30 years and you will look like that too. Not to take away from anyone else's comments here. They are all valid, but time behind the knife is important too.