Knife Sharpening
Confused
by the knife sharpening task that we are stuck doing?
Well,
you've come to the right place. Let me try and explain in
plain ol English.
Knife
Sharpening is probably the most important and least understood
aspects of oboe reed making. My teachers always used to tell
me that there are two "secrets" to reed making.
The
first one is:
Have
a sharp knife.
The
second on is:
Have
a sharp knife.
Well,
I can honestly say, they were right. If your knife isn't sharp
in the correct way, then you won't "scrape" the
cane off. You will "rip" the cane off. A good example
of this is when you push a bit too hard and you find half
the side or corner of the tip on your plaque.
In
the infinite words of the great pool player Minnesota Fats,
"Your not supposed to do that".
Not
good.
Before
we can talk about the actual knife sharpening, let's
talk about a bit of theory first.
In
general there are two types of knives. Sharp ones, and dull
ones. No, actually there are the double
hollow ground, and the bevel
knives.
The
blade on a double hollow ground knife is very different than
the bevel knife, so it must be sharpened differently.
-
The
blade of a a double hollow ground oboe reed knife
is not like the blade of a razor. With a razor,
the two parts of the blade meet evenly at the point.
It kind of looks like the following:
-
An
oboe reed knife has an edge which sticks out a bit
more on one side. This little piece of metal is
called the burr. This is what cuts the cane and
it does so in a scraping motion.
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As
you can see, getting the burr is orrect is the secret. More
on that in a bit.
The
goal with the bevel knife is to get the edge completely even.
So
how do we sharpen these things? Here is some information on
sharpening double hollow
ground knives, and bevel
knives.
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