How To Sharpen A Filet Knife

AFTCO Fillet Knives take chop-chop become a staple in the tackle numberless of all anglers. Whether on your camping trip filleting walleye or perch, or offshore breaking down a big tuna or swordfish, the AFTCO line of Fillet Knives are perfect for the job. Now available in five models: the standard eight", 10", and 12" lengths, and a flex series in vii" and 9". But, when you have this knife at home, how exercise yous ensure your knife stays sharp enough to properly interruption down your grab?

Do I Demand To Sharpen My AFTCO Fillet Knife?

AFTCO Fillet knives are made with Boker 4116 Stainless steel featuring a 56-58 on the Rockwell Hardness scale. This makes our filet knife a soft steel knife. Soft steel knives are often made of German Stainless steel and are perfect for flexible fillet knives cutting through small bones like an AFTCO flex filet pocketknife. The reason you want a soft knife is to reduce micro chips in the pocketknife when hitting rib bones or backbones in a fish. The soft steel's edge rolls saving the knife from breaking. Because the edge rolls, it requires consistent honing. Honing a blade takes that rolled border and brings information technology back to a straight edge, making it sharp once again. When honing a knife, you are not sharpening the knife but rather reshaping the edge. Nosotros recommend honing a bract at least every twenty-four hours you lot use the pocketknife but to ensure the sharpness, information technology is best to hone your AFTCO filet knife earlier every single big fish. If your pocketknife does non get honed frequently, and so the blade will continue to roll more than and more making your knife feel dull. Once information technology is rolled too far, no amount of honing will reshape the edge, and you will take to acuminate the blade creating a new edge. Bated from honing though, we do recommend sharpening your AFTCO knife at to the lowest degree in one case a year, or more, if you utilize it very frequently.

How To Hone a Pocketknife

There are many techniques to hone a knife and a method we found useful is placing the tip of a honing steel on a towel to prevent slipping. Place your knife at a very slight angle to the honing steel and in a down motion with light force per unit area, swipe down running the whole blade along the steel, making certain to not forget the tip. Practice this on each side equally, approximately 8-10 times. Yous will get faster and find the mode you lot prefer to hone your steel with experience. Again, this should be done before using the knife each day.

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How To Sharpen a Fillet Knife

Once a year or sometimes more than depending on use, your knife will need a true sharpening. This requires a sharpening stone of some sort. The all-time fillet knife sharpeners use two styles of stones. There are water stones, known every bit whetstones and oil stones. We like to acuminate our AFTCO knives with whetstones. The start step is to choose the rock y'all are going to be using. When knives get very dull and have microchips, they require a coarser grit stone to start with to create a new edge. Think near sandpaper, and the aforementioned method applies. We commencement with a coarse grit such every bit 300 or 400 to create a new border. After that, a 3000 to 8000 grit is considered fine grit and will be used for polishing the blade, and honing. If you want to use only one stone, a 1000 medium grit stone is recommended.

How To Use a Sharpening Stone

Once yous have your whetstone, the rock may need to be soaked in h2o for at to the lowest degree 20 minutes (preferably 30 minutes). If y'all bought a "splash and go" stone, then you lot tin skip that step. Once you accept soaked or prepped the stone, its time to get started.

The ane thing you demand to make sure yous become right when sharpening fillet knives is keeping a consistent angle on the knife blade every bit you sharpen. A tip to know, a good angle is to place ii quarters on your sharpener and lay the top of the pocketknife on the edge of the quarters and keep that bending one time you remove the quarters and start.

A good way to think nigh it, is to sharpen your pocketknife in the direction you normally use your pocketknife. Since we slice past pulling with a fillet pocketknife, use that motion. When sharpening knives that you chop with and push down, acuminate in a pushing motility similar to a downwards chop.

First with a fibroid or medium dust stone, and hold the knife in your dominant paw. If you are sharpening the viii, 10 or 12 inch fillet knife, place three to four fingers of your secondary hand on the blade to use for pressure. If you are sharpening the flex vii or 9 inch blade, employ two fingers since the blade is thinner, hiding whatsoever other fingers and then they are not open up to an accident. Using a slicing movement, run the blade from heel to toe making sure y'all sharpen the whole blade, counting the amount of times you make the slicing motions.

Make sure to utilise a base for the stone that has traction or put a towel underneath the stone to ensure it does not skid. Extremely important because slipping tin mean cutting yourself. You lot may need to arrange you position a little at the tip to make certain the full knife gets sharpened.

Afterward making a few sharpening motions on the stone on one side, flip to the other side of the blade and attempt to keep the bending you initially used and repeat the amount of swipes you had made previously.

Once you have done the first set of sharpening, y'all can carefully rub your finger confronting the border to feel for a burr. The burr tells you that yous take created a new border and you are ready to movement on to the side by side stone. If you do not feel the burr, that is okay. Go on doing the previous motions in increments of x sweeps until you experience a noticeable burr.

Whether you go from coarse to medium or medium to fine, complete the same verbal motions for another 30 to 40 strokes each side. Now that yous are on the fine grain, you are going to polish the stone. Since the grain is and then fine, it polishes the blade when you strap the bract. Think about former fourth dimension westerns where the cowboys used their leather belts to strap their knives. Aforementioned thing! But with a polishing stone.

With your fine grain stone, y'all tin do the same move every bit before making sure yous get contact on the whole pocketknife. Only do it in one direction, starting with 10 times on each side, and and then 8 strokes each side, then 6, 4, ii, then do 1 stroke on both sides multiple times. Along with polishing the knife bract at present you are taking off the burr to leave simply a precision sharp knife one time y'all are washed.

After sharpening brand sure to hit your knife on your honing steel but a few more than times to dial in your edge. Now it's time to test on a tomato or a piece of newspaper ensuring yous got the edge you're happy with.

This process may take time and may take exercise but doing this once a twelvemonth with your knives volition ensure you lot have sharp knives to break down fish of all sizes. If you employ a pocketknife often, make sure to acuminate frequently as well and quickly y'all will get a master line-fishing pocketknife sharpener. Slow knives cause accidents in kitchens and on boats more than anything else, so please be sure to proceed your AFTCO pocketknife precipitous and information technology will last you a lifetime.

AFTCO makes everything you need to treat your fish the right way. With everything to get your fish overboard such equally gaffs and quickly dispatching your fish with a fish bat or Ike Jime Spike, to the side by side level fish care Ike Jime Excursion Breakers and fish processing fillet knives, AFTCO has yous covered. Nosotros too have all the resources you demand to learn the proper processes for how to keep fish fresh on the boat, how to fillet a fish, and and so how to vacuum seal fish.

Source: https://aftco.com/blogs/tackle-how-to/how-to-sharpen-a-fillet-knife

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