wood carving sharpening knife and tools.

most sharpening information on the net is awful. the bushcraft and zombie apocalypse movements have spawned thousands of ignorant fools spouting nonsense into each other's mouths and then writing about it. These guys literally have no way of knowing what sharpening is because they don't actually use their knives. A wood carver learns to sharpen because he uses his tool. There's been many a bushcraft idiot show off his expensive large knife and how sharp he has made it by shaving his legs. This is the epitome of bad sharpening info. Shaving your legs or cutting paper have nothing to do with a properly sharpened knife. Well it does show something but...okay basically when a knife is sharpened it is first rubbed on a rough grit sharpening device. The steel is removed from the blade all along the bevel down to the tip. At the tip, the steel is so thin that instead of being removed it just bends. It's literally like tin foil. No matter how much sharpening is done that little piece of metal will remain. It's called a burr. In proper sharpening, the knife is rubbed on increasingly finer grits. This takes out the previous grits' scratches and makes the burr smaller and smaller. Until finally the burr is not visible to the naked eye and then the knife is stropped on leather which removes the burr and brings the edge to a mirror polish. At any stage before the final stropping the burr represents a weakness. It is like a hangnail and if the knife is used it will fold and pull some of the actual blade edge with it. Besides the fact that a bendy piece of metal is mashed up in front of the edge making it dull. Now this is sharpening for things like woodcraft. a sharp but strong knife edge is needed. Another use for knives is shaving of bodily hair. In the old days razors were hand sharpened and stropped for shaving. Now, shaving hair requires an even sharper edge but requires no strength. 'Sharp' is like 'hard'. It is relative and not a black and white scale of being. When a straight razor is sharpened a large burr is cultivated early in the sharpening process and that burr itself is actually honed with much work on a slack strop. This is what most people think of when they hear 'stropping'. A barber going up and down a slack belt with a straight razor.
      The moral of this story is that getting a burr is good. leaving the knife at that will cut some hair, not great but it will cut a few sparse leg hairs...but using that edge without moving through the grits, and with an intent for use in mind is, a fairly worthless knife indeed. Unless your opening a doritos bag or entertaining friends as dumb as you are.
 

this is a rather small burr under a macro lens. note the grits' scratches.

This is the final product for a carving knife. The burr is gone, the scratches on the bevel are not just gone but the surface is a mirror finish for minimum friction when cutting. Note the reflection is not distorted. Many novice sharpeners round the nose, creating a steeper angle of bevel than desired