Learn to sharpen a variety of knives and edged tools. Designed for normal people who want to keep their blades in good shape.
13 Chapters | 57 Lessons | 5+ Hours of Video
That’s why you’ll find a knife, hatchet, axe, saw, or scissor in the emergency supplies of every expert on the planet, and why a blade is one of the very few items people keep on their body for everyday carry.
But knives are wear parts — they dull with time and use, becoming ineffective and dangerous. If you don’t know how to keep your blades sharp, their usefulness will drop off quickly in an emergency. Skills are just as important as gear!
These skills help you save money in daily life, too! Don’t toss out kitchen knives or scissors that just need a few minutes of love, and don’t pay others to sharpen them for you. Knowing how to care for your blades will also help protect your investments in quality field knives, axes, hatches, etc.
We start with the basics and get into hands-on demonstrations with all of the common sharpening gear you’ll find among preppers.
Sharpening Fundamentals
9 Lessons
Diamond Bench Stone
5 Lessons
Storage & General Maintenance
6 Lessons
I’m Jon Stokes, deputy editor of The Prepared and lead on all of our bladed gear reviews. I’m a life-long knife nerd who started using and caring for blades as a boy growing up in the woods and bayous of the Gulf Coast. 40 years later, I still enjoy breaking out the sharpening strop for some mindless unwinding at the end of a busy day.
If you visited my home, you’d see stacks of books ranging from the history of knives to modern steel smelting processes, a collection of 100+ blades, buckets of sharpening tools, and a slightly-annoyed wife!
I’ve spent countless hours on similar courses and training, combined with years of interviewing experts in my role as a journalist and prepping teacher — and I want to shortcut your journey based on what I’ve learned.
Prepping is about anything that could majorly disrupt your life, which might be as simple as a car accident or sudden job loss. Natural disasters are another biggie, as are things like pandemics, economic crashes, civil unrest, and worse. Here’s more.
These courses are meant to apply to normal life as much as possible, but they also explain what to do in the really bad scenarios.
Courses are broken into lessons (eg. “Dehydration”) and their topics (eg. “Symptoms” or “Treatment”). You move through at your own pace and in whatever order you want. Most topics have a main video with additional pictures and text beneath.
Once you finish a course, you’ll know enough to get you through the vast majority of emergency scenarios you’ll face and you will be better prepared than 99% of people around you.
You’d be shocked at how much dangerously-wrong “advice” is taught online. Skip the rambling amateurs, extremist hermits, and ineffective lessons that don’t actually make you safer.
Even if you can find good free needles in that massive haystack, it will take days of hunting just to come close to these high-quality, professionally-taught courses — and you won’t get the ‘whole package’ of a structured, memorable flow built specifically for modern preppers.
In-person learning is great, especially for getting dynamic feedback as you practice your skills. And for hanging out with other people. Here’s a list of local training centers. Many of our video instructors also offer in-person lessons. But physical classes are often multiple times more expensive than these online courses, require you to travel, and you can’t go at your own pace.
You might want to take an online course so you can warm up at your own pace before your limited and expensive in-person time. Maybe you want to try the cheaper online version first before deciding if you want to go to a more advanced physical course. Or maybe you’ve taken an in-person course and want the digital version as a refresher you can go back to over the years.
“Been around knives all my life, but there were plenty of things I’d never seen before.”
Marc Sanders
January, 2021
“The Prepared runs more in the scouting-for-adults vein rather than towards stockpiling for the zombie apocalypse.”
“The Prepared offer[s] useful, non-alarmist advice on disaster preparedness.”
Whether you’re totally new or just want a refresher, we’re confident you’ll be a successful student.