My father always told me the knife you cut yourself with is the one you let grow dull.

I was too young the first time he told me this to understand how a dull knife is much more dangerous than a sharp one. When a knife is dull you tend to muscle it – and that leads to putting to much force behind the stroke and increases the chances you’ll take a bad hold on something to get more leverage.

As a kid it didn’t make any sense. Right up until one summer day when I was using a pen knife to cut through the interior of a baseball. The leather had peeled off and the core looked to be made of Japanese candy wrappers layered over each other. I was a kid and I had some crazy idea that if I could get to the center I might find something cool. The more I worked at that plastic wrapping, the harder I had to push because the blade was getting duller and duller. So of course I muscle it into the plastic wrappers and it slips. It was one of the first times I really hurt myself by accident. I had a huge cut across my left pointer finger.

I stared at the blood and remember thinking I was screwed. My dad was going to be so pissed – he’d told me to be careful. I wrapped a paper towel around my finger and ran across the street to hide in a buddies garage until it stopped bleeding. I then played the “hide my cut” from my Dad game until he noticed. Thankfully he was working 3 to 11 back then and by the time he noticed it was a few days healed.

Which brings me to the point of this trip down memory lane. A dull tool is a dangerous tool. You want a butchers knife to do all the work when you are gutting an animal. The blade should do the cutting, not your muscles.

How do you keep your blades sharp? You keep one of these Dual Grit Sharpening Stone close at hand and make sure you keep all your blades sharp and ready to go.