Miscellaneous Sharpening

Hi,
Every now and then, about once a month I go to a really cool little restaurant and sharpen for about 5 or 6 hours. It is a great little spot and folks in the area bring their knives and I pretty much sharpen steady the entire time.

I get to see some pretty nifty knives and I often end up taking them home to finish off.

It is a good workout for my water stones, this is pair of 220 coarse stones, the one on the right, WAS the same size as the Imanishi on the left but this is over period of 3 months, I don't wear these out in one day that's for sure. You can see the Naniwa on the right needs a little flattening which is pretty easy with these stones. That is the problem when I am so busy sharpening, it is easy to neglect the flattening, especially when people are waiting.

I am very often asked the same questions, or hear the same comments.

"My knives are probably not worth sharpening"

I always tell folks that they are or to let me see them at the very least,  and in most cases they are worth sharpening.  Now if it is 3 dollar paring knife that has gone through hell then no, I tell them just to buy a 6 dollar paring knife or a good one and keep it sharp.


The other thing that is common is Steel abuse, or Gadget abuse. We have all seen knives for sale and in the same place is a "sharpener" of some form, a wheel or triangle thingie and it is easy to see which knives have gone through them not just by the condition of the edge but by the marks on the blade.

However, I don't blame people, they are just trying to keep their knives sharp and fall victim to trying out the "worlds best sharpener, guaranteed to work"

I have said it before but I think that in the cases of men, most of us have had an urge at one point to sharpen knives but we didn't know how exactly, not at first anyway, most of us learned from mistakes. When I started there was not computers, no Blogs, no Jon Broida videos, so I was pretty much just going from what my dad taught me and undoubtedly repeating mistakes in technique.
Of course, making a mistake isn't life threatening in the world of sharpening (not in most cases anyway, unless you are using a grinder or something that can throw the knife ).  The important thing is that we had the urge and interest and in my case, that just continued and luckily, over time I met the  right folks and learned a technique that works for me.

The other common statement/question is concerning technique, when I sharpen in the restaurant, people can see me, it's right up front so a lot of people ask about technique, different patterns, and so on. "I thought you had to use figure 8"s" for example.

I tell people the technique can be different but it has to be something you can repeat over and over and over and be comfortable with. Also of course, you need to be abrading the metal, so the stone must be removing and refining as you work.  The key question is, "Is the knife sharper than when you started?"
Try to cut a tomato, if the tomato bends before the edge digs in than the knife can be made sharper so that it slices effortlessly. If you can make the knife slice instead of tearing that is awesome.

The knives in the two pictures here all belong to the same person, I will have a good time working on these. The one immediately above will be tricky though, how the hell am I going to get into that curve :)

Until next time.
Thanks so much for looking and reading.

Respectfully,
Peter