Keep Going

I’m in the process of updating our online course, “Refining Your Technique.” At Fine Leatherworking, we adhere to the practice of continuous improvement. For example, I update the content to incorporate new questions and insights when we run an in-person course. Our courses are not static, and I always want to improve their quality. If you’re already a member, you get updates for free forever.

In our most recent run of this course, the same concept kept coming up again and again: 続けて(tsudzukete) “keep going.” If you take Refining Your Technique online in person, the entire first day of class can be spent sharpening your tools. If it is the first time you’ve ever sharpened your tools correctly, it can take a long time. For some students, that meant they only completed sharpening one tool, their knife. Eight hours of sharpening one tool can seem unthinkable for a new student.

Mr. Niwa and I got many questions during knife sharpening, ‘is it done?’ ‘Is this good enough,’ ‘What about this spot,’ ‘How do I make this area even with this area?’ Most of the time, the answer was the same, ‘keep going.’

When I launched ‘Refining Your Technique,’ I edited the sharpening sections to only show the highlights. I didn’t think people would want to sit through and watch sharpening for an hour or more with seemingly little change. So, these sections are shorter; some are maybe a third of the actual time it took to sharpen the knife in the video. That knife was not new, so it was a shorter process than sharpening a brand-new one.

The unintended effect was that our students had the wrong idea of how long it would actually take to sharpen a new knife. Several thought the knife was already sharp out of the box, and it was sharp to a certain degree.

It can take a long time if you’ve never sharpened your knife before, that is, to a leatherworking-worthy sharp edge. For some students, it could take all day. You must prepare your sharpening stones, true up the knife’s surfaces on both sides, take it up the grits, and then strop. All of these take time to get right, especially when doing it for the first time.

The benefit is immediately evident once you complete the process. One student said, “I had no idea I could get this knife this much sharper. It’s like the leather isn’t even there when I cut through it..”

Their first sharpening session may take all day, but the next one will be half that time and the next half again. After a few sessions, it will start to mirror the length of what we recorded for the online course, which was about an hour or two. It takes about an hour for someone who knows what they’re doing to true up their stones and do a first-sharpening of a knife that feels already sharp out of the box. Sometimes, it’s shorter and indeed gets shorter as you later are only honing the blade rather than correcting the original edge. When you first do it, it can seem like sharpening takes forever, but you usually need to just keep going.

There are some signs to watch for in this practice. For example, you should check to make sure you are not creating a new bevel angle on your knife and check that the edge is sharpening evenly. This and other details are the point of starting your leatherworking practice with sharpening. It’s not a ‘thing to get through’ but a way of learning to pay attention to the small details. It’s how you build sensitivity with your hands.

For example, several students had trouble feeling the burr of a knife. When sharpening one side of the blade, a burr forms, which is a tiny curl of metal at the edge, it’s a tell-tale indicator to switch to the other side when the burr is consistent across the blade. Feeling the burr can be difficult for a beginner because they don’t have a sense of what to feel for. It’s extremely small and nearly impossible to see without magnification, but you can easily feel it once you train your fingers.

The practice of sharpening increases your tactile and visual awareness, which extends to other aspects of leatherworking. In the course, we show people how to do a 1mm overcut, that is, cutting a 1mm excess on two layers of leather so you can trim them evenly after gluing. This sounds impossible without scribing a 1mm extension line, using a straight edge, and cutting to that line. You may not be able to do it after one, two, or even ten tries. However, it’s often a simple matter of ‘tsudzukete,’ keep going.