The Best Knife Buffing Cream

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