• I use cotton rope as a clothes line for drying wet gear after a rainstorm or stream crossing. Cotton is easy to work with, and damages trees the least. It also tends to be the easiest to cut.
• Poly is a good choice in the winter as it doesn't freeze, even when wet. But, it is a tough rope to cut, both because of its hardness and the hair-like fibers that make up the rope.
• Nylon is a tweener rope, as easy to work with as cotton, light like poly; it is also soft and easily frayed.
• Finally, while not a rope per se, there is webbing. I use webbing to attach stuff to my backpack, and to suspend my hammock. Webbing can easily fray, though it doesn't unravel like nylon or poly.

• The Rainbow Leek cut the cotton rope (1/4 in, 0.64cm) cleanly and effortlessly both dull and sharp. I was surprised at how little resistance the rope gave, it was just like cutting butter. The ends were clean, and ready to be wrapped.
• The second rope, poly (3/8 in, 0.95cm), took two attempts at cutting through, even with a newly sharpened knife. There was little fraying, and both ends of the rope were cleanly cut. The end of the right side is ready for fusing, the end on the left came unraveled a bit, but required little more than a twist to be ready for fusing.
• The third rope, nylon (3/8 in, 0.95cm), also cut cleanly and easily, but unraveled the most. The Rainbow Leek needs to be sharp to cut nylon, when dull I had a hard time cutting cleanly though all the fibers. A quick sharpening on a strop should be sufficient.
• Cutting the webbing was surprisingly easy, almost as easy as cutting the cotton rope - I was really surprised at this, figuring I have a harder time than I had with the poly. But, the Rainbow Leek was through the webbing before I had given more than an average pull on the knife. The cut was clean and ready for use, though fusing needs to be done even on a cut this clean.

Determining the correct angle: As I said, 18-22 degrees isn't an easy angle to eyeball. Fortunately, being a woodworker, I'm use to coming up with little tricks to make a task easier.

What I discovered is that if I stacked five pennies and evened the back of the knife up with the top penny I had an angle of 20 degrees - smack in the middle of the two angles! Stacking the pennies onto a sharpening steel would be a little trickier than I wanted to try, so the next task was getting this "perfect" measurement into something that I could easily transfer onto a sharpening steel.

I found that if I placed my thumb up against the back of the blade, while it was resting on the table, the blade rested just a little above the centerline of my thumbnail. Now, all I had to do was to keep the blade up against that part of my thumb, then rest my thumb up against the steel. Now I had a starting point for running the blade down the sharpening steel.

As recommended by Kershaw, I ran the blade of the Rainbow Leek down the sharpening steel, 10 times on each side of the blade, maintaining as even a pressure as possible. The results were spectacular -- My knife was almost as good as when it was new, I'm sure with a little more practice I can get it to a perfect edge.

• The cold steel makes handling the knife in cold weather not a job for bare hands. When the temps drop I make sure that I have my liner gloves on before using the Rainbow Leek.
• The locking slide has a tendency to loosen when I slide it back and forth (on before it goes in my pocket, off when I go to use it). Fortunately, it can be tightened again, but the purchase of a special tool (#2 torx) is needed. I could only find this small of a torx in a set that cost $14.99 at a local electronics store. I would suggest that inclusion of a small torx-driver would be of more benefit than the pouch, which I have never used and can no longer remember where I put it.
• I don't know whether it was because of the coating, but I did notice that sticky-stuff (orange juice, dough, etc.) seems to dry quickly on the blade. Fortunately, the coating makes it easier to clean the stuff off with just water.