Newsletter Volume 2

Precision sharpening is not a lost art!

Along with the disappearance of the blacksmith went a business that could sharpen and repair just about anything for the home or business. How many times have you wished you knew someone who could sharpen your kitchen knives, or your hunting knife?

Leave it to someone who had an appreciation for edge tools and 38 years in the publishing business to come up with a sharpening service that draws from the best of the abilities of a blacksmith and the best of the abilities of a professional marketer to fill that huge void. I’m speaking of Ronald A. Green, owner of The Strop Shop®, a sharpening service located in Burnsville Minnesota.

When Green was just six years old his father gave him a pocket knife which soon needed sharpening and he’s been sharpening one thing or another ever since. He really got serious about a sharpening business in 1992 when he purchased a set of German-made Wüsthof Classic kitchen knives. It was then he realized that, if he wanted his new knives sharpened as they should be, he would have to locate the best sharpening equipment on the market and do it himself. He came up with a precision machine that is hand-operated, microscopically accurate, very fast and uses water stones.

After he had sharpened his own knives, scissors, wood chisels, plane irons and other utensils and tools, his family and friends asked if he would take care of their sharpening needs as well. Then came acquaintances and their families and friends and before he knew it, he was operating a part-time sharpening business. To accommodate the variety of items he was asked to sharpen, Green began increasing capabilities by adding more sharpening equipment to his shop. He would even buy tools at flea markets that needed reconditioning and sharpening just to gain the experience for when the real thing came along.

With the equipment he had accumulated, Green began contemplating opening the doors to his part time sharpening business to the public. Over the next few years he added what he would need to sharpen all types of knives, scissors, blades and saws, saw chains, yard and garden tools and even unusual items such as tweezers, double bit axes, drill bits, barber shears and hair clippers and many other items.

His focus was broader than just the advent of the sharpening itself. Green wanted to know the correct sharpening angle for all the items that might pass through his shop. Should a 10-inch chef’s knife be sharpened at a different angle than a hunting knife? Does a 5 degree angle work better for a paper cutter than 9 degrees? Should a wood chisel be sharpened differently for working with hard woods than for soft woods?

Not only that but he wanted to know when it is acceptable to sharpen an item with a course stone and when it is better to sharpen with a very fine stone. He wanted to know how to corrugate a pair of shears to prevent “push-ahead”.

He wanted to know what kinds of alloys were used for what tools and why. How does one temper a blade? Should the cutting edge of a blade be tempered but not the spine and how can that be done?

It was important for him to develop a technique that took a dull knife or tool through a re-shaping stage, then a smoothing stage followed by a finer honing stage and finally, a stropping stage. The condition of the knife or tool usually determines the grit to be used for the first stage, and how course the stone that is used in the first stage determines the grit of the second stone that fine-tunes the shape of the edge and so on, through all four stages.

Green adds, “The idea is to give the customer a perfectly shaped and stropped cutting edge without removing one micron more metal than is necessary. This increases the life of the knife or tool.

“In the final stages of the sharpening process it is essential the cutting surface be made as smooth as it can possibly be so that it cuts rather than tears through food or its intended purpose. This is why the stropping is an indispensable step. It’s the step that polishes the cutting edge to the point that it gleams in the light”.

Book purchases, untold hours of online research and personal experience ensures like new performance from the items sharpened by The Strop Shop®. The art of sharpening just about anything has been brought up to speed with other space-age technologies available today.

“Sharpening is no longer a thing from the dark ages and there’s no guess work to it. It’s a highly scientific process that, when utilized, will put a smile on just about any cook’s face”, says Green.