That High Performance Edge

I have been working with CPM10V heavily for about a year now and have had great success and customer satisfaction. Until now! I just got a comment back on a knife I just shipped out. The customer said overall he was very pleased but had to resharpen the blade to his satisfaction and to remove the wire edge.

This was very disturbing to me. I try to have every blade I ship razor sharp and ready for action. Do I need to change something in my sharpening process? Here's my current method:

1. Grind edge with a new 400 grit belt using a 17 degree jig on the 2x72 grinder.

2. When the flat disappears I go to a new 600 then an old 600.

3. I work the edge to get a nice fine wire edge then go to the buffer and polish the wire off with a carboard wheel and a bit of green chrom ruge.

When I thought about it this morning it dawned on me that 10V doesn't polish for diddly and I my have to change something. Any Suggestions?

Doug, I would strop on a piece of leather charged with buffing compund (I glue mine to a board), rather than buffing. Buffing can create its own wire edge.

My only experience is with CPM-3V, and I use slack belt only to produce a convex edge, but generally I follow about your procedure up to the used 600 grit. From there I go to a plain polyester belt (K&G) charged with white compound. I will usually still see a very fine wire.

(Green compound for some reason reacts with 3V and clouds it badly. The same might happen with 10V, and be causing your problem to some degree.)

I then strop on rough leather without any compound. If it is not as sharp as I like at that point, I touch it lightly to a loose buff with white compound, angling the edge away from the direction of the buff.

If it's still not as sharp as I like, I go back to 400 grit and start over.

And if it's still not as sharp as I like, I go back to 400 grit and start over.

Etc.

Well, I don't have any experiance with 10v, but on most of my knives I do a convex edge and after hand rubing are fairly sharp and just touch up with the Norton Fine Indea stone, then a fine Arkansaw stone, then if I want it scary sharp instead of a working edge, I buff lightly with white rouge.

One other thing, I know of several people who are not satisfied with the edge on any knife unless they are the ones who put it there. I mean it could split atoms and they would atomaticly resharpen first thing to suit them.

Thanks guys you gave me some things to look at.

Jerry interestingly I usually use white compound on the final edge polish. I switched to green because the white was doing nothing. I mean I could niether see or feel any difference after stropping with white compound! I just went to what worked.

Green compound is a good bit more aggressive than white, and that might be part of the problem. It really shouldn't take much to strop that edge. 10V is really tough stuff so you may not see much happen, but at that point I would be going mostly by feel anyway.