Serrated Knives

Hi,
I get an awful lot of folks asking me if I do serrated knives and every now and then I get fellow sharpeners asking how I do them.

I will make a video soon, as soon as I am done with my renovations.

This is my new sharpening bench, it is longer than what you seen in the picture, five feet long actually. I love it because it is extremely sturdy and even has a place for some of my water stones, (and bottles of wine).  It's cool because when I am teaching sharpening, the student can stand right beside me.

Back to serrated knives.
It is something I have adjusted technique on many times, but the one I started with and still use partly is the one I learned from Ben Dale on his Edge Pro Inc site.

This is how I do it and again, I will follow this up with video soon.

For normal sized bread knives, i.e. not the serrations on folders, which I do as well but more on that later.

I have a ceramic rod that is the exact size of the serrations on a bread knife. I place the knife on end of the Shapton stone holder, the one in the picture above so with the serrations up and I simply run the rod over each serration. You can easily see the burr from use on the serrated side and I am pushing this back over to the flat side of the knife.
Now you don't need a ceramic, I used dowels with micro abrasives wrapped around them before to do this.  You just need to get that fatigued metal out of the way, and you CAN use the edge  of a Water Stone. I first heard about this method from Ken Schwartz a couple of years ago and then I saw him doing it on one of his videos.
I use that method all the time now.

This is how I do it, your method can vary and keep in mind, a lot of folks just don't sharpen these knives.

-Use ceramic rod on serrated side to push burr over to the flat side.
-Flip blade and using my 400 stone at almost zero degrees, but not quite, I sharpen the flat side very gently, my goal is to remove the burr, not to form another one on the serrated side again. 
- Now I got to my 1k stone and using either the rod or the edge of the Stone I gently sharpen the serrated side and then flip and repeat. Pressure is very very light, and I am careful not to wear down the points of the serrations. Many times, the knives I get have points almost gone and sometimes, I can't sharpen them. I can remove them however and change the knife into a slicer. 
-Repeat the process on a 2k stone or whatever stone I am finishing the knife on.
*Make sure there is no burr on either side when done.

For small serrations I have some diamond cone shaped sharpeners from DMT, I will put them in the video.

You can use the Edge Pro bench and Edge Pro at almost zero degrees to do this, in fact I did this for a few years, it works great. I just find it quicker to use my water stones, full sized ones that is.

This process is surprisingly quick and effective.
I didn't invent this, I just picked some tips and tricks from various sources and got comfortable with it.

I used to tell people to just buy a cheap 15 dollars serrated knife, use it for 6 months and then buy another one. I don't do that now, that is a little wasteful.

Video to follow to wrap this all up.

Peter Nowlan