hmm I will try with tomato then
Ok I got a Sharp Pebble Premium sharpening stone. 1000/6000. Sharpened my nice pocket knife and a couple of our decent kitchen knives. But I’m not sure the results are as good as with my Chefs Choice Trizor 15 XV electrIc sharpener? I’d read using the electric sharpener damages the knives is that true?
I had a heck of a time with the 15 degree guide that came with the stone and gave up on it. Is this why the results feel just “ok?”
Nice electric sharpeners are pretty good, though they tend to have a “fuck 'em up” set of wheels just like a cheap one or the back of an electric can opener. If you’re just using the ceramic wheels then it can do a great job.
A non-Japanese kitchen knife will probably have been sharpened to 20 degrees a side rather than 15, which might explain your results. Forget the guide and just experiment with lightly pushing the blade across the stone while increasing the angle, when you hit the current grind you should feel a difference, stop there (maybe back off a tiny bit) and sharpen at that angle and you should see results. Give it ten firm strokes and see if you can detect a burr forming on the other side, that’s the key.
Thanks that helps a lot.
How can I tell what kind of wheels are on my electric sharpener? I assume they’re replaceable?
I do like just the experience of using the stone.
Cheap ones might have a carbide wheel (metal, very coarse) and a ceramic wheel (white, finer), it’s the carbide wheel that eats away too much material. Generally just avoiding the coarsest wheel is a good idea unless it’s a really nice system, a really cheap knife, or a really dull knife.
Any sharpener removes a bit of metal. The coarser the wheel/stone/belt, the more it removes. I’ve seen oversharpened knives and you would REALLY have to hit yours all the time, every day in something like that to really become a problem. You’d also know you have a problem because the geometry of your knives will slowly change. If they aren’t expensive knives, is it really a problem? Go for it.
I wouldn’t use that often on an expensive knife. Think of the geometry of a knife. The middle and top of single-sided blade (top to bottom,) is thicker than the cutting edge. As you slowly remove metal from the bottom to sharpen the edge, you very slowly inch up the blade. You can imagine this at the level of someone in a professional kitchen running a knife through an electric sharpener every day, multiple times a day. If one of those wheels is coarse, they are just grinding that edge away closer and closer to a fatter part of the blade, and that changes the blade itself. No longer does it glide through things when sharpening, as you’ve changed it from a narrow V, like this:
To a wider angle because you’re trying to sharpen a thicker blade, like this:
And so you really screw the ability of the blade to cut through objects well.
This is a 12 minute video on sharpening that is amusing.
He buys $1 knives. He dulls them. Then he resharpens with a 400/1000/2000 then strop. That $1 knife can cut slices off a 2x4 for 35 minutes before it stops being able to cut paper well.
There’s also another test where he dulls it, and gets it to paper-cutting within a minute.
There’s also magnification showing why that extremely popular pull-through sharpener is bad. Tl;dw you’re cutting with the burr, not the apex (tip of the V) of the knife. The pull through doesn’t break the burr off.
I think that solves my earlier sharpening troubles with a simple “Get a better stone!”
Along with proper angle and one thing very few people mention, proper amount of pressure. I found it hard to figure out what that is, you can press on a kitchen scale. I was being too careful at first.
Yeah, for me it was the confusion of having gotten decent results at first, but then it wasn’t as good this last time. (Although my family was pleased with it when we shared meal duties over the holiday!) I expect I simply wore through to a bad spot in those cheap double sided stones he talks about in another video. I’ll have to try one of the better made ones. A single malt sharpener, if you will.
In this video he describes his go to best 3 stones:
What is a strop? He doesn’t have a link to one but briefly shows himself using one.
I think my main concern is figuring out how to hold the knives at the correct angle, since that seems pretty important.
A few people here use strops upthread. It’s a way to get a final razor edge.
The angle depends on your knife, you can follow the existing one by feel. The steeper the angle the sharper but it doesn’t last as long. So I do my meat cleaver broader.
People say use a marker on the blade so you can see if you have the right angle. What I found useful is pennies to visualize the proper height but how many pennies is gonna depend on the size of your knife.
But what matters is a consistent angle. You can sharpen a blunt butter knife to cutting sharpness in minutes. I have an idea, why not actually try with a butter knife if you have a low grit stone. Then you can’t really “mess it up”.
I think after a few times it didn’t seem too hard to “feel” the right angle.
edit: also don’t feel you have to line the stone perpendicular to your body. It looks nice on a video but my arm moves more smoothly at a 45 degree angle. YMMV
A strop is a flexible surface like leather where you’ve added a suspended very fine grit. It’s a cheat for keeping a sharp knife extremely sharp.