Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmo
I did that and made the crap set worse so donated them.
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If you're serious about learning, it's actually pretty simple. The two biggest impediments for people are low quality stones and the overcomplicated sharpening techniques found online. The third is that stainless knives are about 5x harder to sharpen than carbon steel, so get one of the latter to learn on.
Regarding stones, avoid the cheap amazon dual grit ones. They're soft, wear quickly, and sharpen very slowly. It's hard to get enough feedback to know when you're doing something right and when you're not. Water stones will generally be better than oil stones for the same reason, they cut faster.
If you're just sharpening stainless kitchen knives it's usually not worth going above 2000 grit. With carbon or powdered steels I like to go up to about 5000. For regular sharpening I just hit my 1200 and a strop. I'm a big fan of the Atoma diamond stones. The Naniwa green brick and Suehiro Rika 5K are exceptional. The King stones are great entry-level options, but wear quickly.
For technique, many work, but I think this one's easy.
- Sharpen one side of the knife. Periodically inspect the edge by pulling your finger across the burr. This will form on the top side of the edge (bottom being on the stone). Keep sharpening the same side until you feel the burr along the entire length of the edge.
- Repeat step 1 for the other side of the knife. The burr will move from one side of the edge to the other. Keep sharpening until this happens.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each grit in your progression until you're created a burr with the finest grit.
- Congrats. The geometry is done. But your knife still can't cut because of the burr. At this point, with a stainless knife, you should be able to use a honing rod to knock it off. Or if you want to stay on the stone...
- Flip the knife (so the burr is face down). Remember how long it took to create the last burr? Sharpen this side for about 2/3rds as long. Flip. 2/3rds. Flip. 1/3rd. Flip. 1/3rd. Flip. Keep decreasing the time spent on each side until you're doing 1-2 strokes between flips.
The last step is the most critical, and why lots of people have trouble getting something to cut. The goal is to grind down the burr without creating a new one on the opposite side. Done slowly like this it should be pretty straightforward. With practice you'll be able to knock it down with larger jumps between flips.