i feel like making this video it's almost like a cheat that i'm giving you because
it's a secret that i've been trying to unlock now for so many years of knife sharpening and it's
the mirror polish of the profile of a knife and then i discovered this buffing compound by coyo
and it has completely undone all of the hard work i've put the countless hours i've put into knife
sharpening and polishing those are hours not wasted okay i'm gonna keep telling myself that
now if you guys have seen my last few videos you guys will know that i'm kind of on a cake with
knife polishing right now particularly yanagibas so you guys may be wondering
why would anyone want a mirror polish and why is ricky talking about mirror polishes now
when over the last few years i've always said that i like kasumi finishes better
so let me make a few disclosures for my personal knives at home my kitchen knives my chefs
caritskays patties nyquiries that i use at home i don't really care to go over 3000 grit
at the cutting edge so for all my personal knives my knives will only sharpen up to 3 000 grit at
the cutting edge and then strops now this is a yanagiba and single bevel knives yanagibas
usubas these knives are a little bit different when it comes to their cutting characteristics
they generally cut vegetables that may be thick and wide starchy daikons fish you know raw meats
so in those cutting scenarios you'll find and if you ever get a chance to use one use two knives
side by side one with a mirror polish and one without you will notice that the knives with the
mirror polish on their flat side or the hiras are definitely much more better at releasing food than
the knives with the kasumi finishes or without any sort of polishes at all now your knife cutting
edge on yukioto is thinner than a width of a hair so you can go from a 1000 grit to a 6000 grit
or even 8 000 grit and get a nice clean edge but when you're talking about you know three or four
square inches on a knife that's a lot more area space to polish and so your grip progression needs
to be a lot closer now here's the thing a lot of us want to get these mirror polishes for our
knives but to do it correctly the traditional way it's very expensive think about a whetstone let's
say your average goodwood stone is forty to fifty dollars and you gotta go from let's say 320 to
you know 600 to 1000 to 1500 2000 thousand four thousand six thousand eight thousand ten thousand
you know if you were buying cheap white stones that cost between twenty and forty dollars
that are sold on amazon and ebay sure you can probably get away with spending two to three
hundred dollars the cheapest method i have found speaking with my friend aaron gibson
is using sandpaper going from 140 320 400 600 800 1000 2000 3000 grit that is the cheapest thing
you can do for your knives if you want to get a nice mirror polish on your profile of your knives
that was the technique i used on this knife right here before i polished it with the coil compound
so aside from the raw cost of purchasing multiple redstones the second thing people have to worry
about is technique sharpening your knives is hard enough polishing your knives is actually even
harder because there's so many nuances and there's so many things that changes while you're polishing
your knives from different whetstones now one of the things that makes it most challenging
for many people when using wet stones is that you want to keep your wet zones flat so you have to
buy a wet stone flattener that is an additional cost now the major problem people don't realize
is the flatness of your wet stones have little to do with the problems that you will face it's
actually the flatness of the heater on your yanagiba i have found knives under 150 to 200
basically knives that are not using hand engraving for the logos knives that use pressure engraving
those knives tend to have a concave section right along the logo that pose is a very difficult
problem because you will have this concave section that you cannot buff out with a wet
stone and so for those who are getting into knife sharpening and polishing and you didn't know that
you will spend days if not weeks trying to you know buff out one little spot on your knife and
you'll never get it because your wet stones can actually never reach those areas when you
are buffing this knife or polishing this knife an inch at a time there is an area of overlap
that is really hard to mix and mesh and so you generally don't polish the entire length of the
hira in one stroke you can that is a bit more challenging so the recommendation is you do it
in sections and so when you blend it in sections it's really hard to blend the overlap and finding
a way to blend those micro scratches is quite hard you have to get a nice stroke from the
heel all the way to the tip and back and forth repeatedly so after i made the switch from wet
stones to sandpaper it was a huge godsend because now i can polish the entire knife using no more
than two dollars worth of sandpaper even with all of those grits factored in basically all you need
is two to three square inches of a particular grit progressively from 320 to 3000 now for most of us
that satin mirror polish you guys get from a 3 000 grit sandpaper is more than enough but you guys
know me i'm always pushing the envelope seeing what i can do especially when it comes to products
that you can buy for cheap which is what this one here is um the cost of this little container is
somewhere along 10 or 11 dollars it is the best 10 or 11 investment you can possibly make let me show
you the before and after of what this knife looked like here is a knife with just the rust eraser
here is what the knife looked like using just sandpaper up to 3000 grit
and now here is a knife after just using one treatment of the coil compound
you can probably use any sort of buffing cloth you want a jewelry buffing cloth works fine
microfiber towels work fine i actually didn't have any laying around so i bought the pink sheets
that coil makes i don't think there is actually anything special with this pink cloth i think
it's just jewelry buffing cloth and they infuse it with a buffing compound that's really what
you're paying for i did buff the knife with just the pink cloth and it did okay it definitely was
better than the 3000 grit sandpaper but it didn't give me that nice mirror polish that i really
wanted that's what i tossed on the coil buffing compound so i use the blue because the blue one's
technically for stainless and i think it's also the most aggressive of all the buffing compounds
so that's what i use i'm sure you can use other ones too i actually also have the green because i
have knives with brass fittings and brass rivets but i don't think i'll be using it very much
for my knives i'm sticking with the blue compound i'm pretty sure that was what it's made for
and you can see the results are just absolutely fantastic you can see during the buffing process
a lot of material comes off i would have never guessed that even after 3000 grit of sandpaper
there would be that much material that would come off the knife clean up with a snap you simply wipe
it down and that's it i would recommend you wash the knife before you use it on your food
it leaves no residue it's super easy to use but this knife here literally after one treatment
this is how good the knife looks i also wanted to point out i did try a few things that people were
asking me about they want to see if i can polish out knives with scratches on them so i took two
knives that i'm working on they both have lots of scratches on them they basically were returns
from customers and i basically did the exact same thing applied the buffing compound to the profile
wiped it down and tried to buff it out using the pink cloth from coil it didn't
really do anything you can see there's a lot of material that came off of the blade but it wasn't
enough to actually cover the scratches those scratches are left over from whetstones and from
bones i don't know what else is there but they're actually pretty scratched up you can see they're
pretty damaged and so even though the buffing compound made the one side glossier and smoother
it wasn't deep enough to remove any major scratches this nagabot on the right is a
true 700 dollar knife and you can see the mirror polishing is beautiful and the knife on the left
is this 20 which only has one application of this coil compound you can see they look
fairly close obviously if you hold these knives you can tell which one is the more expensive one
um but compared to this to zero raw cost under a hundred dollars the knife brand new
the handle is about a hundred dollars and then two hours of sanding and sharpening and then
five minutes of buffing with the coil so all in all total investment was two hundred dollars and
roughly two hours of sharpening and polishing time if you went out and bought this buffing
compound and try to put it on all your knives at home you're just going to waste your money
you're not going to really get any of the results that you're looking for you have to work up to
that point uh with 3m sandpaper it was 3000 grit different sandpaper brands will have different
levels of grit ratings so you just have to be aware of that basically go to the highest grit
you can go to with whatever sandpaper you're using and then apply this buffer compound at the end or
if you already have a yaga bar or a knife with the mirror polish and it has some hairline scratches
on it and this would also be used to remove those scratches and bring that kind of that luster back
to your knife so it's not a miracle product but it will definitely help you bring your
polishing of your knives to a different level i wouldn't buy this product if you were not planning
to polish your knives profile if you're trying to get something for your cutting edge and get your
best cutting edge that's all technique a buffer compound will not make your knives any sharper
it only is meant to make your knives more glossy at the profile if you already have some sort
of polishing technique that you're using already this will just enhance that this will not enhance
knives sharpness so that's all on you i'll be using this coil buffing compound a lot more
i'll try on some other knives especially the masses collided knives knives are kind of sticky
i wonder if this will actually solve some of that sticky-ish issue with a lot of the domestic
knives that are out there i'll report on that as soon as i can so yeah no buffing machine needed
no hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of what songs needed just some sandpaper and a bottle of
buffing compound um so that is the biggest secret of knife sharpening the mirror polish in a bottle
all right guys well that'd be for this video i'll catch you in the next one