stropping your carving knife

[Randy Cornelius]

The rough side will hold the rouge better than the grain or smooth side. But you can do it either way.

RC

[indypbear]

Hilly,

ALL are good answers to your questions. Re- stretch and rubber cement (RC), if you are going to line it any way use RC and find a hospital xray dept that throws the cardboard from the film out or the film itself (bad images for trash) and RC to that. Ask the Chief Tech. to save it for you. Try shelf paper for the project that you are not going to line. It will peel off after tooling and leaves no sticky residue.

As for the stroping, follow the recs for the group above.

"Happy Toolin'".

Indy

[SCOUTER]

Hi Hilly,

Re-Stropping. Stropping is only done after the blade is very sharp. It puts that last polish on the blade allowing it to pass thru the leather with minimal effort. I have found that if you take an old cereal box, remove cereal =) and turn box inside out. Now take box and cut strips around 2 or 3 inches wide. The stips will now measure aprox 2x10. Now take some jewelers rouge, either red or white (red is quicker cutting and white is finer) and apply the rouge to the strips by stroking the rouge stick down the strip about 5 or 6 times until there is a small layer of rouge on the cardboard strip. Now the fun part, take your knife and lay the blade on the top of the strip so that the blade bevel is FLAT on the strip and DRAW the knife back along the strip keeping the blade bevel flat on the strip. After a few pulls you will start to see small metalic residue on the strip GOOD now flip the knife and repeat. Look at the blade now, it should look SWEET! =) Hope that helps.