Sharpening

Your broadheads and knives should always be nice and sharp. Throughout a sharpening process, I captured magnified pics of the edge as I went from 240 grit to fine polishing. The knife is from the kitchen and not of great quality. Also, I am no master sharpener so my technique might not be the greatest.

For the pics below, apart from when I used the strop (last 2) I used wet and dry paper on a mouse pad. This technique does not give a bevelled edge, rather a rounded convex edge. If I wasn't running back and forward to the USB microscope the whole sharpening process would have taken around 10 minutes. The knife edge had some pretty big nicks in it (I don't have a before picture). Also note that the knife was manufactured with a bevelled edge.

I don't have any jewelers rouge so the last stropping was done with Josco's Green stick from Bunnings. I mixed some cutting oil with water to wet the strop then rubbed the stick onto the strop (which is fixed to a piece of wood) then away you go.

The magnification is not great and the knife is not positioned in exactly the same spot each time but there is a fairly clear progression in terms of reduction in the depth of scratching in the edge (as you would probably expect).

$/!\$ For a knife that was a bit blunt but otherwise in good nick, I would probably start with the 800 or 1200 grit wet and dry.

There are heaps of videos on youtube (eg this one) showing a variety of sharpening techniques.

240 grit

400 grit

800 grit

1200 grit

strop with 320 WH automotive grinding paste

strop with Josco green stick

Just so I don't forget, the command I used to grab a frame from the video stream was

ffmpeg -y -i stropfine.avi -vframes 1 -ss 1 -an -vcodec png -f rawvideo -s 640x480 stropfine.png

If you are wondering why I captured the images as video it's because if I use the button on the side of the microscope, everything moves. Then I used

for f in *.png; do convert $f ${f%.png}.jpg; done

to convert to jpg to make them a bit smaller.