The gentle coarse stone.

Hi fellow sharpeners,

If you have followed by Blog you will notice that I have a very strong opinion regarding the importance of coarse water stones.

Now.....if you sharpen only a few knives, i.e. your own knives which is pretty much what most people do and add in a friends knife here and there than the coarse stone can be put aside. In theory, once you have your knife sharp you can keep it sharp with  the 1,000 to 3,000 grit stone.

However...what if you let it get a little dull or you need to do a little thinning or you have noticed a tiny little chip in the edge and you want to reset the bevels, you want to try something different?

I can't imagine not owning a 400 grit water stone but then again, I sharpen every single day for 4-6 hours a day so having one is imperative.  Now what if you don't need something that coarse but you do want something to speed the sharpening process up.

Here you go, I have the perfect stone for you, in addition to your 1k and up stone.

Naniwa Professional 600

I got this stone from my favourite on line store in Canada, Paul's Finest.  This is a fantastic water stone, not coarse enough to punish you if you add a little too much pressure but it measures up to the task of removing the metal you need to remove, the debris that is making your knife dull in the first place. The feedback on this one is awesome, it does not feel like a coarse stone at all, and in fact I suppose it is in the upper end of the coarse stone range.

Now I am trying something different with my dull knives, you won't need to do this if you are just touching up your semi dull knives:

I start with the Naniwa 220 stone to get the ball rolling, reset the bevels, repair and little nicks and make the knife sharp. Then I move to the 400 and sharpen with reduced pressure and I follow that up with the 600. This process is quick but it builds what I will call a very stone foundation edge, one that  is nice and strong and sharp and easily ready for a 2k stone to finish the process.

As I have told you before, I always use my stones in a pattern, a three stage pattern with each phase being different only by the variances in pressure.

Again, Phase one.....lots of pressure to produce burr.
Phase two - medium pressure to start removing burr and work on coarse stone refinement
Phase three - no pressure, concentrating here on cleaning the edge debris, burr removal.

This is what I do with the first coarse stone and the only difference that I make with every other stone is that I don't start with lots of pressure, it isn't necessary..

A clean edge is key and I perform this task by stropping on my 13k Stone with weight of the blade pressure only and doing this 6-10 times. Now I do this with every stone but you can just do it with the last stone, as long as the edge is clean, i.e. burr has vanished. That makes sense I hope, what is the sense of doing all the work to sharpen the knife if there is any burr remaining?
Clean it and it isn't that hard to do.


To summarise, most folks don't really need a stone as coarse as 220 or even 400 but it sure doesn't hurt to have one in the 600-800 range.

Also.......don't forget a stone flattener, the Atoma 140 is the best I have ever used.


Take care
Peter