How to Sharpen a Hunting Knife

Sharpening has a reputation for being a dark art, and it is not. You are grinding two flat surfaces until they meet in a line fine enough to part tissue. Two things go wrong for almost everyone who struggles with it: they cannot hold one angle, and they move to a finer stone before the coarse one has finished the job. Fix those two and the rest is mechanical.

What you need

• A coarse abrasive for setting or restoring the edge. Diamond plates are the most forgiving choice for modern knife steels, which are hard enough to dish out softer stones.
• A medium and a fine abrasive for refining it. Many bench stones and field sharpeners combine these in one tool.
• A strop — leather, or a leather-faced block — to remove the burr at the end. This is the step most people skip and the one that makes the biggest difference to how the finished edge feels.
• A permanent marker. The cheapest and most useful item on the list, for reasons that will become obvious in step two.

If you would rather the tool held the angle for you — and there is no shame in that — a guided system does exactly that. Our sharpener roundup covers which type suits which problem.

Step 1: Clean the blade and look at the edge

Wash and dry the knife first. If it has been used on a deer, treat it as contaminated: the CDC recommends wearing gloves when handling deer carcasses and minimising contact with brain and spinal tissue, which applies to cleaning the tools afterwards as much as to the job itself.

Then hold the edge under a light and look straight down at it. A dull edge has enough flat surface at the apex to catch light and show as a thin white line. A sharp edge is too fine to reflect anything. Any bright spots you see are the places that need work — note where they are, and note any chips or rolled sections, because those determine how long you spend on the coarse stage.

Step 2: Find the angle with the marker test

This is the single most useful technique in sharpening and it takes a minute. Colour the bevel — the ground section running along the edge — with a permanent marker. Set the blade on your coarse abrasive at your best guess of its angle and take two or three light passes. Then look at what happened to the ink:

• Ink removed only at the very edge: your angle is too steep. Lay the knife down flatter and try again.
• Ink removed high on the bevel, still present at the edge: your angle is too flat. Raise the spine slightly.
• Ink removed evenly across the whole bevel: that is the angle the blade was ground to. This is where you sharpen.

Two or three iterations gets you there. Once you know the angle, commit to it — every stroke from here on is at that angle, and the whole job depends on not drifting.

Should you keep the factory angle? Usually yes, because it is what the maker chose for the blade’s steel and intended job, and re-profiling to a different angle means removing a great deal of metal. Work Sharp’s framing is the useful one: a wider angle gives a stronger edge, a narrower angle gives a better-cutting one. If your knife keeps rolling on bone, go wider. If it is a dedicated skinner and you want more keenness, go narrower — and accept the longer session it takes to get there.

Step 3: Coarse work until you raise a burr

Now the actual sharpening. Work one side of the blade on the coarse abrasive with steady, moderate pressure, moving the whole edge across the surface so the tip and the heel get the same attention as the middle. Most people under-work the tip and over-work the belly — watch for it.

Keep going until you can feel a burr: a tiny wire of displaced metal running along the opposite side of the edge. Check by running a thumb gently across the edge from spine to apex — never along it. That burr is the proof that the two bevels have actually met at the apex. Until it is there along the full length of the blade, some part of your edge is still rounded over, and no amount of finer work will fix that.

This is where most failed sharpening sessions go wrong. If your knife is dull after twenty minutes of effort, the reason is almost certainly that you never raised a burr and moved on anyway.

Step 4: Flip and repeat

Turn the knife over and work the second side at the same angle until the burr flips over to the first side, along the full length. Counting strokes helps keep both sides even — whatever number it took on side one, aim for something similar on side two.

Step 5: Work through the grits

Move to your medium abrasive, then your fine one. With each step, use lighter pressure and fewer strokes, alternating sides more frequently. You are not removing much metal now; you are removing the scratch pattern left by the previous grit and shrinking the burr.

Skipping straight from coarse to fine leaves deep scratches that the fine stone cannot clear, and the edge will feel sharp briefly and then fail quickly under use. The progression exists for a reason.

Step 6: Strop

Lay the blade on the strop and draw it backwards, spine leading and edge trailing, at your sharpening angle. Ten to twenty light passes per side. This aligns and removes what remains of the burr.

Do not push the edge forward into the strop — you will cut it, and you will roll the edge you just made. Edge trailing, always.

Step 7: Test it

Two tests, in this order. First, look down the edge under a light again — there should be no white reflection anywhere along it. Second, hold a sheet of paper by one corner and slice down through it. A properly sharpened knife cuts cleanly without catching or tearing.

If part of the blade catches, that section did not get enough coarse work. Go back to step three for that section only.

Touching up in the field

Mid-job field sharpening is a different exercise and should be quick. Wipe the blade clean, take a few light passes on the fine side of a guided field sharpener, and get back to work. You are restoring a working edge, not rebuilding a bevel — do not start a full grit progression on a deer in the dark.

This is exactly why a field sharpener with built-in angle guides earns its place in a pack. Cold hands, poor light and a slippery blade are the worst possible conditions for holding a careful freehand angle.

How often

Touch the knife up before every hunt, and expect to touch it up again partway through a deer. Short, frequent maintenance on a fine abrasive keeps an edge indefinitely and takes a couple of minutes. Letting a knife go completely dull means a full coarse-to-fine session and removes far more metal from the blade — sharpening is subtractive, and the knife only has so much steel to give.