Thread: Need to sharpen kitchen knives

Hi,

An observation:

It seems that most 'domestic' steels are more like sharpeners these days, than 'edge aligners'.

E.g. diamond coated steels, striated ceramic rods etc.

Many moons ago, when I did a lot of meat cutting (I worked in a slaughter house), we used only the finest surface finished steels (so called 'smooth steels' in the UK), and some used just highly polished steel rods (as per the American 'meat-packers' steels).

I must admit, I do now use diamond & ceramic 'steels' to touch up my blades, and use the smooth steel for daily use.

Have fun !

Best regards

Russ

You might find that the Naniwa stones dish out quite fast if you use them for knives. They're fairly soft stones and I find the 1k in particular dishes pretty fast when I use it.

The Shaptons work well for knives though..!

I was going to make a comment similar to Stubear's...

OK, and I will. When I sharpen my home knives I tend to lean on the knife fairly heavily to begin with. I use a Norton India combo and make circles on the coarse side, wipe it, turn it over, oil the fine side and make long srokes - heel to tip. Once I can catch my thumb nail with the edge for its entire length, I wipe the India fine off, put the cover back on the box, file it away, and take out an Arkansas to finish the edge. On that stone I use the same long heel to tip stroke with gentle pressure and test the edge with my thumb pad. Once satisfied with the edge I wash the blade with soap and water to get the oil off, wipe it, and throw it into the drawer with all the other knives.

Or rather rack it paying heed to the newly improved edge.

I've made wood boxes for all my stones, but none are mahogany and none of the stones are glued in ala Charnleys. So with the lack of glue I can flip the stone over to use either the coarse or fine India or work at wearing out both sides of the novaculite (these stones seem to just smile at my best efforts in that vein).

I'm sure I'm not as fussy about kitchen knives as many of you probably are, but they will slice tomatoes, cube stew meat, render carrots and celery into smallish pieces, and dice onions well enough for my cooking attempts. I haven't tried to shave a peach yet, or sculpt an ice cube - so I admittedly have a ways to go.

I decided to restore an old kitchen knife I have, but funds are tight, so here's my super el cheapo method.

The knife is about 17-18 years old and so the edge wasn't very straight at the heel of the blade from being "sharpened" with a chef's steel many many times. I dremeled it straight, sue me lol. The bevel on the edge was pretty bad for the same reason. I have a stone from Canadian Tire, it's something like 400/800 or maybe 600/1200, I can't remember the grits or how much I paid (under $20). Soaked it for a bit and did most of the bevel setting with the rougher side and got the bevel perfect with the fine side. Then I stretched two layers of old t-shirt fabric over a piece of wood and put some 2000 grit sandpaper on top of the fabric, only doing spine leading strokes to clean the edge. Then just the fabric with Turtle Wax rubbing/polishing compound rubbed into it again only spine leading strokes (I actually put the rubbing compound in the fabric and started using that before the sandpaper but remembered I had some 2000 paper and used it, the layer of rubbing compound definitely made the surface smoother). Finished up by stropping on my pants then on my arm. It's now able to shave my arm hair and cut damn near silently through a sheet of paper. Total cost was under $30.