Donating more than just time to a worthy cause.

For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in getting a Repair Café up and running here locally. We meet one evening a month to help people fix home appliances that they bring in. The idea is for the people to do as much of the repair as they can under the guidance of people with more experience. The repair café also has tools that most folks wouldn’t want to buy for a one time fixit. We have everything from soldering irons to all the special “security” screwdrivers it takes to open anything from smartphones to wall-wart power supplies.

The folks from the repair cafe recently took part in a sustainability exhibition organized by the local branch of the Omas for Future (grannies for the future.) We spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons that weekend fixing small appliances in the middle of the exhibition while people came and went and asked questions of us and the grannies.

One of the projects I took along to keep busy was a pile of kitchen knives and my sharpening stones. Conversations with the exhibition visitors about how to sharpen knives reminded me of one of my mother-in-law’s friends who had mentioned buying cheap kitchen knives and simply throwing them away and buying new (cheap) ones when they got dull.

I realised that there are quite a few people who don’t know how to sharpen their own knives and don’t have the equipment to do so - that’s a perfect match for the repair cafe concept of providing tools and knowledge so that people can take care of their own stuff.

I purchased an inexpensive set of four metal “sharpening stones” that have bonded industrial diamond grit surfaces. To go along with them, I spent a few hours in my garage and my hobby room making a holder for using the stones as well as a carrying pouch to keep them together. I also made a leather strop for finishing the sharpened surfaces of the knives.

I didn’t make photos when I made the holder or the pouch, but I did make photos of the leather strop.

Before the making is the collecting of materials. A strop such as I use is nothing more than a piece of leather glued to a hardwood back. I have an old, worn out belt that I kept for just such a project and a couple of racks of wood scraps in the garage.

Materials
Materials 1
Materials 2

Circled in red is the strop that I made for myself several years ago.

There’s a piece of beech wood in that picture as well as a piece of the belt, already cut to length. The beech wood is simply a scrap that was about the right width and length. I rounded the edges and sanded it smooth then gave it a coat of hardwood floor sealant.

Assembling the strop is the next best thing to trivial - put glue on the smooth side of the leather, then clamp the wood and the leather together.

Assembly
Assembly 1
Assembly 2

Once the glue has set, trim the excess leather with a sharp knife.

The leather strop serves two purposes:

  1. Remove the wire edge after sharpening the blade on the stone.
  2. Polish the edge of the blade so that it slides easier through whatever you are cutting.

The leather alone would take care of the first point. To make the strop polish the steel of the knife, I rub some polishing compound into the rough surface of the leather.

Polishing compound
Polishing compound

The polishing compound is the same stuff I use on a buffing wheel to polish metal parts that I make from brass or steel.

The whole kit together looks like this:

Knife sharpening kit
Knife sharpening kit

That’s the full knife sharpening kit I assembled for the repair cafe, along with a kitchen knife.

The kit consists of the following items:

  1. Four “stones”: 240 grit, 400 grit, 600 grit, and 1000 grit. You need much finer stones for extremely sharp blades, but the idea here is to get usably sharp knives with minimal work.
  2. A naugahyde pouch for the stones sewn on my Adler class 8 sewing machine using the Bigfoot motor speed controller.
  3. A wooden holder for the stones, cut from a scrap of beech wood.
  4. Two clamps to affix the stone holder to a table while working. The clamps were used to hold flower boxes to the window sills in front of the house. Since we converted the front yard to a flower garden and took down the flower boxes, the clamps were just laying around the garage with nothing to do.
  5. The leather strop to polish the cutting edge of the knives after sharpening.
Usage
Usage 1
Usage 2
  • In sharpening the knives, you push the blade across the stone as if you were trying to shave a layer off the stone.
  • In polishing on the strop, you drag the blade across the leather - if you try to push it you’ll cut into the leather. You normally hold the strop in one hand while using the other to pull the blade across the leather. I’m sort of handicapped - it would take three hands to work the strop and make a photo, so that’s a staged picture to indicate what to do rather than how to do it.

I’m going to print up some flyers for the repair cafe mentioning knife and scissor sharpening then distribute them around town to the usual places (grocery stores, bakeries, etc.)

I called the stones “inexpensive” above, but I think it would be more honest to call them “cheap.”

Cheap stuff
Cheap stuff

The metal strip of the 600 grit stone isn’t set properly on the plastic base, as indicated by the arrows. That wouldn’t be a problem, except that the stone is supposed to be set in a recess in the plastic base. Offset like it is, the 600 grit strip is bowed - is doesn’t lay flat. You have to remember to start sharpening a couple centimeters away from the label (where the stone is flat again) when you use it, else you’ll mess up the angle on the blade.