Thanks for pointing me to Free42. The one I am currently using, RPN Anywhere, is good, but I think Free42 might have better key bindings, which makes calculations a lot more friendly. I tried only entering 220 one time, but that does not seem to work. Meaning that as soon as I do a calculation with the 220 (like 220, enter, 30, enter, <divide>) all of the operands are gone and I need to enter 220 again to do the next calculation. The reason I did 220 twice in my demo was because I only had to press enter a second time instead of typing 220 (and enter) two different times. They are both equivalent of course. Which one is more efficient? I guess that's an open question. Thanks again.

@@briangentry3118 also check Plus42, from same developer, but more features.

I'm unconcerned about RFID security. However, I did do some experiments a while back. I had an access card for a door that worked by proximity. The card had to be right next to the sensor to open the door. I put the card in the top position and was able to open the door. In the 2nd position, or further down, I couldn't really get it to open the door. I think as card #2 I got it to open one in 5 or 6 tries. But that was really unreliable. I ended up pulling that card out manually every time. The XSTO is a big "C" made of metal. From the back is it essentially a big RF shield. It's a section of a Faraday cage. You can make your own judgements about the overall utility of having an RF shielded wallet. My opinion (though you didn't ask) is it's just a bunch of hand wringing. RF shielded credit card holders are a non-feature. There are no instances of RFID credit card theft that I'm aware of. It's far more common for your CC details to be stolen by wait staff at a restaurant that run your card through a skimmer in their pocket when they take your card to charge you for the food. In today's world, with smart phone apps for every credit card, you can easily turn on notification for each and every charge. You will then know in real time when any and all charges are made. This gives incredible peace of mind. There's no wondering if the card got charged. No worry that someone has stolen the info and might make a charge. You will know, instantly, any time a charge is made. So you can then turn that card off and contact the card issuer to reverse the charge. We live in a wonderful time! But again, make up your own mind. I've made my opinion quite clear I think. :)

@briangentry3118 Thanks for the info. I'm more concerned as I travel overseas a few times a year. I've been warned of credit card scanning in 2 particular countries I visit frequently. Of course I have notifications for each transaction but the whole point of having protection is so I don't have anyone spending my money. No pt in notifications if I've already lost thousands lol. Some sites don't prompt a code to be entered which usually you receive via msg. I guess I can always purchase 2 rfid blocking cards to place as my top cards but it sort of defeats the purpose of having an easy access wallet. I looked at the Ekster Parliament and Senate wallets which are great, but don't contain enough cards within the lift mechanism. I also hate the band for cash as it gets caught and loosens in and out of the pocket. Ive looked at Ridge, Groove Life, Secrid and a myriad of other brands but the Xsto is the most practical. Storing 8 folded notes is a pleasure without adding to the bulkiness of the wallet like the other ones do with only 2 notes. I need to exchange cash when travelling, but when I'm in the my home city, I hardly carry cash. Do you know of other brands I can look at?

I had to go look up my order receipt. Yes, this is the Crimson Red color. I just examined the wallet very closely. It still looks great. Turning it over and over in my hands I couldn't find any issues with the powder coat. ....but then I looked at the corners and found a pin point sized shiny spot where I think the powder coat may have chipped off. You really have to look to find it and with the naked eye, I can't even really tell what's going on. Just that it looks like maybe I'm seeing bare metal. In a PINPOINT sized area. It's been not quite 3 full years since I ordered the XSTO wallet. I've carried it everyday (minus one or two days per year) since I've owned it. I still think it's the best wallet I've ever owned.

@@briangentry3118 Wow thank you for the quick response! Appreciate the advice! Highly considering picking one up for myself. Having trouble deciding between the black and the red!

This is not my design. I purchased this product. If you want to give feedback to the designer you can go to www.mechusa.com and use the contact form or the email address shown there.

Finger cut test is a very advanced technique! lol I sharpen a lot of blades on a 1x42" belt sander using various belts. I believe I finished that particular blade using a leather belt loaded with compound. I own quite a few sharpening systems. I use the belt sander the most because it produces results very fast and make a very consistent edge. I have some videos on this channel demonstrating sharpening on that belt sander. Your skill level is exactly why I wrote my "Seven Secrets Of Sharpening" document. Do a google search and you'll find it on blade forums. You might enjoy it and/or learn something. Thanks for the comment.

There are some very light marks on it. They are more like shiny spots rather than scratches because they are not through the color to the metal. They are just marring of the finish. It's in very good shape overall. I carry it every day. I'm pretty impressed with how well it has held up.

I used my Kalamazoo 1SM, which is a 1x42 belt sander.

1. Yes this is a good rest. It's the only rest available for the 1SM that was actually designed for it. At least as far as I am aware. 2. 180 and then loaded leather should produce a good toothy edge. Mark (the designer of the KallyRest) has an enormous amount of information on this. Contact Mark and he will give you lots of advice. Leather may take away a lot of the tooth in the edge. It depends on what kind of edge you are looking for. 3. Belt selection is really about what kind of edge you want. Luckily trizact belts are fairly cheap. I recommend the A100, A65, and A45. Those have served me quite well. Best of luck to you.

I show the original first at about the 0:51 mark.

He literally demonstrates the difference for you in this video.

Interesting thought. I don't do any kind of testing like that. Might be fun to see the results. I also don't rock climb or anything that might really strain rope. So I'm more interested in utility than ultimate performance. This video was mainly about the satisfaction of a more beautiful knot. Thanks for the comment. :)

Have you ever had a rope break at the loop knot?

I still use the rest. But not every time I use the machine. Sometimes I do it freehand instead. Particularly with very large things (machetes for example) or for unusual blades like serrated. I still like original belts that I bought for this: A160 for initial grinding. Then A100, A65, or A30 to finish. These are all 3M Trizact belts. Their grit rating are approximate and can be found in this table: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VaTf3MXuwuvH-QLwOci4f9B9Zhkbuu1wjoSCZIUsR-o/edit#gid=0 I generally finish on the A65 for many blades, but will go higher if I think I want more polish. I tend towards are more toothy edge than polished. See my comparison videos on toothy versus polished edges for a performance comparison. You can use other belts of course. The general idea is to start around 100 grit for initial removal (to shape the edge) and then finish somewhere between 220 grit (very toothy) to 600 grit or higher (more and more polished). 220 to 320 seems to be the sweet spot for me. A lot of sharpening shops tend to stop at 320 as well. Best of luck to you.

@@briangentry3118 Thanks very much!

You are correct. I'm not using the KallyRest and not really using the platen either. Though the platter is definitely still attached. The method I've choose for sharpening a serrated blade is: 1. Thin the blade from the flat side, by sharpening at an extremely shallow angle. Less than 10 degrees is the goal. 2. Raise a burr while doing this, along the entire edge. This raises a burr inside the scallops of the serrations. 3. Remove the burr from the scallop side, by allowing the belt to slide in and out of the scallops. The corner of the belt is used for this. In #1, #2 I might be able to use the kalyrest, but it seems in the way and seems hard to maintain this very shallow (close to zero) angle. In #3 (burr removal), it's essentially impossible to use the rest and is undesirable in my opinion. The kallyrest is a good product. But I don't think it's suited to sharpening serrated blades. I'm fairly certain that the inventor of the KallyRest (Mark) does not sharpen serrated blades with it. There are many ways to sharpen serrated blades. Some people think this way is "terrible". I've found it to produce a very sharp blade and it isn't too time consuming.

@@briangentry3118 Sounds good, I understand what you are saying about the serrated blades, I was hoping what you said was the case instead of not using the kally rest altogether for other types of knives, looks like it was just this specific type of knife with serrates that you didnt use it and that makes sense. :) Thanks for the clarification. I just ordered up one of them so hopefully it works as good for me as it does for you. :)

I just watched 30 seconds of this and was trying to remember what I had done to cut my finger before the video. I honestly can't remember. It's been a while. Why couldn't you make this comment 2 years ago? lol.

He showed the grain was running sideways, so he cutting it longwise....that's basically what against the grain is

List of belts used: Trizact A65 (~ 280 grit) Trizact A30 (~ 600 grit) Smooth Leather loaded with green compound. Compound is probably about 3 micron, but it might be as high as 10 micron or so; not sure because it came from StropMan, who makes his own, so I can't be sure of the composition. If your serrated blade is not quite as dull as the one I was using, you could do all of this with a 600 grit belt. I hope this helps.

Not exactly. As I state below, an Angler's loop with a double wrap is very close, but not the same. However a Tugboat B with double wrap is exactly this knot. In the end I have created nothing new. But hopefully it's fun for some people to see it and maybe see something new to them.

...and I thought I was the only weird one! :) Thanks for watching.

@@briangentry3118 I also use an extension in my web browser that has VIM key bindings. I'm sure you've seen those.

@@ChristopherSalisburySalz I briefly played around with some of those. My main aim was that I wanted to do VIM style editing in web based email programs and in forums and things like that. Even comments here on KZbin maybe! But the things I found didn't work well for me. It's probably more about my deeply ingrained habits than anything else. It's interesting to me that I've become such a VIM enthusiast in the last few months. I've been using VIM and VI since about 1992 or so. I just always used it in a very basic way. I never thought it was worth learning all the extra stuff. Incredible how wrong I was. VI and VIM are quite amazing if you take the time to learn them.

@@briangentry3118 Gmail uses some VIM inspired key bindings for navigating in the mailbox. There was a program that override the keybindings in MS Word and MS Outlook but it died off a while ago and I'm not sure how good it was because I never used it.

@Christopher Salisbury I also considered the Canadian made Viel S5M. It looks like a very good machine. But I was considering doing a motor swap in order to get variable speed and it's much harder to do so on the Viel. That turned out to not be relevant for me. I kept the stock motor at its fixed speed and it works just fine. The availability of the KallyRest also influenced my purchase. The KallyRest was specifically designed for the Kalamazoo so... I think the KallyRest is a really good product, but obviously increases the price of the overall setup. I'm very happy with my purchase overall. It gets a lot done in a medium amount of time. It's slow enough to not be very dangerous to knives, but fast enough to not be frustrating. It's a very nice balance. PS: You made another comment about serrated blades and I think I accidentally deleted it. Please feel free to make your comment again and I will respond. Thanks for watching. Brian.

@@briangentry3118 I have also been looking at the AMK 75 sharpener. It looks like a high quality machine. They don't have good advertising so Google searches often don't have it in top results. Would you take a look and give me your opinion on it?

@@ChristopherSalisburySalz I looked up the AMK 75. It's a neat design. The pluses are: Variable speed. Horizontal belt! Included Light. Good looking angle guide with clamp. The negatives are primarily the price. It's about 2x or maybe 2.5x what I paid for the Kally plus KallyRest. The clamped guide is a bit of a minus also as it requires a good bit of extra effort to clamp up a blade. I don't think I'd spend the money on one of these just because it's so close to $1k. But it's nice for sure. Brian.

@@briangentry3118 I agree with you. Does your sharpner scratch up the sides of you blades from running back and forth along the guide? That's the down side usually of an system that has a guide system like that.

@@ChristopherSalisburySalz Occasionally I have seen marks on my blades from the guide. I think it gets metal shavings on the guide, from repeated sharpening, and then moving the blade back and forth over the guide gets it marked/scratched. My solution for the moment is to use a piece of painter's tape on the guide face. I replace the tape every few sharpenings, and especially if I have a knife I'm concerned about. That way I start with a nice clean surface. Seems to work pretty well so far, but I haven't been overly concerned about the sides of the blades I've been sharpening lately. As we always used to say: YMMV

That's an interesting question. It makes me realize I didn't really explain this very well. From the factory, the scales on this were nice and tight up against the tang of the blade. But those scales overhang the scale a good bit, which means that when you run. your finger over the side where the scales and tang meet, your finger falls into the place where the tang is. Because the tang is not FLUSH to the level of the scales. My solution was to sand down the scales until they met the tang so the surfaces were parallel. Now when you run your finger down the side, you feel scale, tang, and then scale again, as they are all flush together. If I filled in any gaps with poly, I didn't mean to. I just wiped the poly onto the scales and then wiped the excess off.

The Kalamazoo 1SM is a fixed speed sander as it comes from the factory. It's SFM is very reasonable though. SFM or Surface Feet per Minute, indicates how much belt goes past the work per minute. The SFM of a typical 1x30 sander is quite a bit higher. That's why you will hear stories about people over grinding blades pretty easily with a 1x30. I considered making my 1SM variable speed by replacing the motor. Penn State Industries makes a variable speed motor designed for lathes, but it apparently works quite well on sanders too. I decided it was too expensive for a first step and tried the sander as is. 95% of the time I'm using the 1SM I think the speed is fine. Every now and then I would like to slow it down. But not enough to spend the money (and time!) to change out the motor. Brian.

@@briangentry3118 I need to do something with mine because I’ve invested too much on belts. I have there waiting with all grits for sharpening but sander goes too fast.

I would want a variety of belts for a 1x30 to sharpen all kinds of blades. As low as about 36 grit for crazy dull stuff like old machetes. Something around 100 grit for regular abused kitchen knives. Then around 300, 600, and perhaps 1000 to 1200. The 300 is a good starter for most beat up serrated blades. 600 is a good finisher for serrated as well as many regular straight blades. A leather belt is good for removing the burr from all kinds of blades. Some hardware store compound is very useful to use with a leather belt as demonstrated in this video. There are a few other belts for other purposes, but something like 100, 300, 600, leather is an excellent starter kit for all kinds of blades. Good luck!