Cleaning a Rusty Knife

Knives are wonderful tools. They can be used in so many ways, from cutting foods to doing the latest craft project. Knives, however, are made out of metal, and with time and wear the knife will slowly become dull, and in many cases knives will begin to rust.

Sharpening your knives is not too difficult of a task. Many knife sets actually come with a knife sharpener, and all you have to do is slice your knife against it. As you are sharpening your knife, make sure you start with the base of your knife and move down toward the tip. This will get the whole surface of the knife and give it a uniform sharpness. If you do not want to use a manual sharpener to sharpen your knives, or if you don't have one, most department stores sell machines that make knife sharpening much easier.

As a side note, if you want to sharpen a pocket knife, you can get a little whet stone from most camping stores. When you are sharpening your pocketknife, you'll want to hold it at a 45-degree angle with the angled edge of the knife facing the stone. Slide the knife-edge over the stone as if trying to scrape tiny slices off of the stone. Make sure that you sharpen away from you, and that you make sure to hold the whet stone in a way that the blade will not cut your hand. Be careful that you keep your knife open. If it closes easily, hold the knife so that it cannot close on your hand.

If you find that instead of becoming dull one of your knife blades becomes rusty, try this neat little idea. Just grab a fresh onion and start chopping up the onion with the blade of the rusty knife. Make sure you chop with the part that is rusty. This action will help in a couple of ways. First, the juice from the onion will help loosen the rust. Second, the action of rubbing the now-juiced rust stain against the onion will help rub the rust out. With most rust stains, one onion will remove all of the rust from your knife.