My New Sharpening Setup

hey everyone Nate here with SimplySharp and um I finally have my new car and my new rig set up so those of you that have been following me uh since the beginning on Facebook and Instagram and some of my other channels uh you remember the Kia Stanger a um really awesome uh sports car that had a great back trunk that I started this business out of but gas was my number one expense and I really needed to get something different and I said hey let’s get an electric vehicle so I’ve got this this is a Hyundai ioniq so we can just kind of take a look at it this is a 2023 model it’s brand new it is all electric it is a they call it a SUV I would call it a little bit more of a crossover to be honest it does have a pretty low ride height and it drives just like a car It actually drives really really well it’s one of the better driving Vehicles I’ve had but um you know what I’ve been able to do to it is kind of turn it into my mobile sharpening business I’m kind of starting here with this setup so I used to have I started with this portable workbench that I’ve had forever and I originally made a kind of like quick work set up in the back of the Stinger that would just pop up out of the trunk I got some like hinges that they use for these like pop-up desks in coffee tables and I mounted that uh to this because it really saved me a lot of time from getting this out of the trunk setting it up plugging in dealing with all the wires getting ready to go I set it up in a way that you know my sharpener is out this thing is just there it pops up I’m good to go this being an SUV I needed a little bit different of a setup so I’ve actually put it on some slides I got some you know industrial drawer slides from Amazon these things will hold actually up to like 200 pounds which is amazing to me and then I just kind of built a little base to support it I’ve got my battery in the back which honestly at this point is really just providing me with uh counterweights this thing doesn’t tip over because I can actually get the power from this car which is kind of a cool trick that I’ll talk about in maybe another video um but you know that that is just kind of my setup as far as like the rig just to kind of have a really fast easy let’s go option so I can get to a customer’s house introduce myself have a conversation with them build a bit of a relationship and then I’m right into the sharpening and when I’m done it just pushes back in I’m on my way I was a real data nerd when I first started doing this when I developed this mount in my first car this cut 12 minutes off of every sharpening session I was doing so it doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re doing five or six seven of these things a day and you’re going all over town and you’re trying to get in and maximize you know your dollar per hour that that adds up um it was surprising to me so um if you want to get into this business this is one of the first optimizations I would make just get yourself to a point where you don’t have to set up and break down every single time um the next thing I want to point you to is this guy uh he’s been the star of a lot of my videos that I’ve made on other platforms um also the star that uh we’ve probably seen a lot here on this YouTube channel so this is a workshop can onion Edition and it has what’s called the blade grinding attachment on it and what’s great about this is It’s a super portable belt sander in my opinion a belt sander is the most efficient way to get good quality sharpening there are I’m sure better I mean for sure whetstones would be a higher quality sharpening but it’s not very practical for a business like this like you just can’t do that many or you have to charge so much nobody’s going to want to pay you for it but yeah so this is a nice portable belt sander this blade grinding attachment gives you some more real estate to work with the Angles and ways that you can get in there are amazing but it does come with an angle guide that makes it pretty easy to set any sort of angle that you need for pretty much anything you’re going to encounter and then you could also just play with some of these areas of the belts and just freehand things so as you get more experience you kind of just know what the angles are and how to do it um you know the other thing I’ve got set up is this is also from Work Sharp uh they don’t sponsor me maybe one day they will um but this is the field sharpening um I think it’s called their field sharpener it is uh a um another sharpener here in the Atlanta area Spike he goes by Sweet Home Atlanta um he turned me on to this thing he said hey this thing is such a invaluable Gizmo and he’s right you’ve got it’s a couple Diamond plates you got a course and a rough and so if you just can’t get into something or it doesn’t make sense to put it on a belt you just need to do a little bit of work you’ve got these Diamond plates right here you’ve got a little bit of a leather strap you’ve got angle guide so they got these 20 degree angle guides if you need to just kind of field sharpen something you’ve got a small little honing rod in here so you can kind of get into small little things like maybe even some of your um if you just kind of need a touch up some serrated knives you’ve got a larger honing thing there and then it’s got some different options to it so you’ve got kind of a rougher side and an even kind of um more rigid side that I actually don’t really use these too much but you know these are things that kind of help you hone a knife if you just need to hone something for somebody real quick or you can even kind of do some interesting things just to kind of knock burrs off and all sorts of really useful things that I keep fighting for this thing these plates also come off so one thing you’ll learn if you get into sharpening is Diamond plates are pretty common and they sell all sorts of different individual Diamond plates and grits you can buy different grits for this thing but this comes with two that are perfectly good you can just leave it like this if you need to kind of just sharpen right on this or you can take these off and use them however you need both of these are invaluable tools I know that most of the community prefers like a larger machine this is a 1 by 18 inch belt most people prefer like a 1 by 30 or higher the belts last longer you get more abrasive surface area uh just do the math and you get a lot more area but um this is just so portable so easy and you know honestly the belts aren’t really all that expensive so I don’t really think about it that hard and if you’re diligent um these belts last a long time I buy these belts from a gentleman called uh Curry custom Cutlery they’re not that expensive and this is a cubitron belt and I would say I used to get about a hundred twenty or so knives out of a belt I’ve since kind of changed up how I sharpen a little bit I’m doing some things at slower speeds I’m just getting better and this belt right here probably has close to 200 knives on it and it’s got like some hedge trimmers a hatchet lots of like loppers and stuff like that like things that are just usually beat up belts a little bit more and it’s still going um I’m not taking it out of surface yet so lots of good ways to kind of get into this um I like to have just a towel available to me one of the reasons that is especially if you get a lot of knives like this work service can kind of start to vibrate and you’ll see this on my channel I actually posted it on um Facebook but I’ll probably post it to um to Here on YouTube as well uh I dropped a customer’s knife and broke about three inches off of it and it turned out okay but um watch that video actually it’s it’s a good lesson learned um but uh this just kind of gives them something to hang on to and they don’t just rattle around and slide off or fall through one of these holes or any sort of shenanigans like that the other thing about this Mount that I would highly encourage so I don’t have a van um the Vans are too expensive right now it was insane what people want for like a Ford Transit and all the used ones out there that are even a reasonable place are just beat the hell it just didn’t make sense and the E the electric Ford Transit is just a nightmare uh price wise it it’s insane so that’s why I got this a nice Hyundai it’s much more versatile I can take it on family trips do all sorts of cool stuff Wicked range on it um anyways where I’m going with all that is you will run into scenarios where you need Shelter From the environment um here in Atlanta yes it does get cold sometime but I can generally just kind of deal with it with hand warmers uh but when it rains um it’s just no fun and uh usually in fact in every single case I can think of customers are super nice they’ll back their car their garage and let me work in their garage or they’ve got like a porch or a patio or whatever so I need to Dismount this quickly so you know just if you build one of these and you know maybe I’ll put up my build um I think I videoed it but I just have like a bolt right there and because I have this this wooden kind of platform the whole thing’s setting on this isn’t even bolted down but it used to be in my previous setup I just had this one thing bolted down and it held it all in place and I just had a wing nut on it so I could just quickly undo it pull this thing off take it in the garage put it back on um that gave me the versatility to not only have kind of this fixed quick uh deployment work platform but I also had the flexibility to take it into shelter when I needed so I would highly recommend doing that um the power setup so like as I mentioned with an EV you can do what’s called vehicle to load you can plug it into basically the charge port and they make little adapters that put out 110 power or 220 power whatever kind of adapter you wind up getting um but if you don’t have an EV or you just don’t want to run it off of that I got a battery a deep cycle battery is what you want a typical car battery is meant to produce a lot of power at once so that it will turn over a car engine it is not particularly well suited for long runs at lower power you will wear out the batteries pretty quickly if you use it that way so what you want is a deep cycle marine battery that is designed to just kind of run at low power for a lot longer it’s not going to give you that initial burst of power like a regular car battery but they hold a lot of energy I spent the extra money to get a gel battery the reason I did that is batteries can produce different gases that probably not going to hurt you but it’s like in a car I can find Space probably don’t want that the other thing is like no matter the orientation like that thing would be laying outside it could be upside down it doesn’t matter nothing’s going to happen to it um it doesn’t like have a risk of leaking like any of that kind of stuff um so it is more expensive but it’s a lot more um uh I guess practical when it’s going to be in an enclosed space like this and you and use this way so I personally I’d spend the money for a gel battery an AGM battery is a good option as well a little bit cheaper I want gel I will tell you that is way too big of a battery I don’t remember what the rating on it is I want to say it’s like I guess I could look but hey it’s a big battery just cost 200 it’s the most expensive single thing I bought is that battery um you don’t need that much um that battery it might be like 1800 amp hours or something like that it’s ridiculous um that’s probably closer to 1200 but anyways uh I almost got about 25 hours of run time out of that I was insanely busy one week I um had a community event and I ran that thing straight for about six hours and then you know I had a full day of sharpening the next day which you know it’s on an awful lot so that’s probably like another three or four hours and it just went all week and you’re not supposed to get those things below um 50 But like after like a whole week plus that big day at the thing I’d probably put like 25 or so hours on it and it went from its initial 100 charge to like 62. um monster battery and uh this thing does not actually draw that much power um the next thing I’ll see if I can get it in here so let’s see if I can do this without taking everything apart all right so we’re gonna get down in there um so you know looking underneath the table that is my inverter now I started with a different inverter is a 400 watt inverter which is the minimum you need to start that thing that’s what the specs say and that’s pretty well true anyways 400 watts will get that thing started and it doesn’t use anywhere near that much power once it’s going so that’ll be good um but what I did and that came from Harbor Freight um and it’s like 40 bucks it works it does its job but interestingly one of the things you notice is the way it produces power so it’s not what’s called a pure sine wave um which just Google that I can explain if you’re really wanted to listen but um you actually notice that in here and you’ll feel a a lower RPM than when you’re plugged into an outlet and B it will kind of the speed will kind of fluctuate at lower speeds it kind of speeds up slows down speeds up slows down and it does it in interesting somewhat unpredictable ways I don’t think that’s that terrible for knife sharpening um nothing has nothing bad has come out of it but it was kind of annoying and um I didn’t feel like dealing with it anymore and I needed another Outlet so I got that guy down there that’s on Amazon um just look for a pure sine wave converter don’t spend a lot of money um I think that was probably like 90 bucks plenty good it makes 1200 watts of power so I have lots of power now for my application um and then I’ve just got like some Storage Solutions so I got these from Harbor Freight and they I’ve got this set up where it has really kind of most everything I need so I’ve got in here I keep my primary set of belts so I sharpen a three belt process 120 Grit 800 grit leather strop so I’ve got that plus a backup and then I have another set of belts which is old beat up belts and I use that for you know whatever but a lot of times for like serrated knives because I found that you know with some of the low higher grit softer belts you can use kind of like the edge of this thing to kind of really get in there and touch up um some some of what serrated knives need like you’re not going to reserate a knife but you can do a pretty good job with just the edge of the belt so if you don’t want to do it with a with a new belt use your old belts for that so that’s what’s in here I got this guy it’s called like a belt um I don’t know it’s called but it’s at Lowe’s Gator makes it it’s over with the sanding equipment it basically just pulls all the dust and stuff off of these and helps the the belt stay a little bit abrasive longer you can also just use a regular eraser like you used when you’re a kid like the little pig piece of rubber um I do have a diamond point in here so this is just a little tool tapered it’s abrasive and it lets you kind of get into some smaller serrations so you just kind of need to do a little bit of fine work in there a piece of sandpaper again that’s mostly used for dealing with serrations a brass brush this is a good tool if you just need to like um you know clean the dust off of something clean grit off of something uh brush off a burr if you’re dealing with something where you can’t really you know sharpen It Like a Knife where you do both sides and the Burr will come off with the belts you can use this um Sharpie because use that for your scratch test that’s another video um that’s about it so that is my setup and then just a plastic bin that has some other things so I carry some compressed air to clean this thing off with um you know you don’t want all this metal dust getting in there because I have actually blown up a motor and I think it was because of metal dust getting in um so I just carry a little can of duster and blow that off um I have a notepad in there with some test sheets of paper like I just use leftover things uh like magazines notebooks I don’t use anymore um like junk mail just like pieces of paper that aren’t too thick and rough um I use that uh just to kind of do my cut tests and make sure that I’ve done a decent job and I also use that bin uh to pick up knives so not every customer has a knife block or something nice that they put knives in like a lot of times I just get like handed a batch of knives and it’s kind of awkward and you could drop them which see my video um the other thing is that uh you know a lot of times I go into a house and they just have all their knives laid out and some people have a lot of knives I’ve got one lady 34 knives um and uh you know like just put them in a bin and um take them out to the car sharpen them up put them back in there and there you go um so there’s my setup hope that’s useful hope that’s valuable um if anyone wants to learn more about how I built this thing or I don’t have like a parts list to be honest um this went through many iterations but I could absolutely tell you um how to build one help you through it give you any sort of uh Lessons Learned advice Etc and yeah there we go thank you have a great day