Testing my knives

I'm somewhat meticulous when it comes to testing my knives, I test each blade for sharpness as I sharpen and then when I am all done. Normally I use the softest paper I can find and that is the telephone book. I go through a lot of those and it is a good test for sharpness. I used to use photocopy paper but that is quite thick and not a great test in my opinion. So the thinner the better, Reader's Digest are good to cut up as well :)

This time I chose some food, peppers and as you can see, the knife could do a fine on those little red and orange slices of pepper. 

This knife was sharpened to 8,000 grit and has a nice mirror polish. Today I also tested a knife that I had done for Executive Chef,  Craig Flinn. I asked him to test his newly sharpened knife on a tomato, and it was nice and soft, very ripe. The knife was sharpened to 16,000 grit and stropped on Nanocloth with 1/8 Micron diamond spray. The knife went through the tomato beautifully, it did not slide over it, it dug in and he was able to slice extremely thin pieces off of the tomato. 

There is a reason I wanted to test this in this type of scenario and I will get into that a little later on.

The knife passed the test so I was happy.