How to Sharpen a Recurve Blade -511 Tactical

Another popular question I get is How to Sharpen a Recurve Blade. There simply is not a tool on the market that will do this blade style justice. If I ever get around to creating it, I think it will revolutionize the industry. It will require a very slight radius. The current options on the market simply don’t do it justice. I will continue working on this idea as I think many blades on the market today could benefit from such a design. For now, we must work with what we have available.

In this post, I will show you how to sharpen a recurve blade in the comfort of your home with the ViperSharp knife sharpener. It is not as hard as it seems to be expected. Even with a stone designed with a radius, we would still need to recognize that it will not work perfectly for every blade. As you can see in the image above, every curved blade does not have the exact same radius. While a radius stone may offer a better solution than what we currently have, there is still going to be a margin of error.

Stone to Blade Contact

So, what we need to understand about sharpening a recurve is that only part of the stone that will work is the part in contact with the blade. When working on the inward curve, that means only the edges of the stone will be in contact with the metal. When working on the belly of any blade, the main contact point is the center of the stone. See the illustration below.

You can still sharpen the blade quite effectively. You just need to keep in mind where the stone is contacting the blade edge, and keep an eye on the creation of a burr. A half round stone does not improve the sharpening necessarily because it also only touches the blade in a small area as well. Don’t overthink it and don’t try to overwork it or force the stone. Keep a natural movement just as you would with any other blade. Unless you are working with an incredibly tiny blade with an extreme curve, you can sharpen any recurve with the ViperSharp system. The video below demonstrates in detail how to sharpen a recurve blade.

Video -How To Sharpen a Recurve Blade

If you are looking for details on more of a curve, you might check out my post on How to Sharpen a Karambit Knife. If you are looking for instruction on a specific blade, contact me and I can give you some pointers or even sharpen it for you and make a tutorial for your blade style. Leave a comment below and tell me what your most challenging knife is.