Why hand sharpen? How do the alternatives work?

I want to make this perfectly clear, I am not a knife enthusiast, I am food enthusiast, good knives just happen to get food on the table quicker. Spending an evening sharpening my knives like a samurai isn't really my idea of fun, despite how raw, elemental and macho it may be. So, my question is, what does hand sharpening do that a tool cannot? Sharpening seems like a task that a machine would do better than a person (at least to me) especially due to the curve of the blade and angle you are trying to set. I should also point out that I only have the slightest inkling of how to sharpen - you start out with course stone and start trying to set a burr (whatever that is) and then you remove that burr with a finer grit stone while setting a new one and move your way up until you can see your teeth reflecting in the knife blade. That sounds a lot like sanding, I do have experience painting and woodworking.

I plan to buy stainless knife soon, like a yoshikane or akifusa and will also need to keep sharpening my shuns. This will probably involve thinning the blades at some point as well as continual sharpening and honing. What setup should I look for? Can I get a "blazing sharp" knife with one of those boring kits? Should I take it upon myself to learn to hand sharpen just to get food in my belly?

I have seen the edge pro kits talked about and it seems that there are some flaws with them and the price/performance isn't quite what it could be. What kit does a better job or do I just need to suck it up and learn to hand sharpen on a beautiful new akifusa?

I know you will get plenty of more detailed and deeper responses from the more experienced guys here, but I'll start off with a few thoughts:

1) oddly, it is b/c of the curve that jig-machines don't work as well as free-hand...I'm not sure I can articulate it, it's a geometry thing.

2) If you aren't interested in free-hand sharpening, then you have to accept what a machine (or service I suppose) has to offer...which will be merely excellent, instead of superior (most services are poor, but you can find some truly superb folks on this forum to sharpen for you). I think this is 100% about what work you are willing to do for what result, not at all at one-size-fits-all....just like selecting a knife itself. I absolutely recommend henckel's knives to people who ask...b/c it's the right tool for them and what they are willing to do in terms of maintenance/care.

3) you can split the difference here and have different knives with different edges, or do maintenance with a jig, but thinning/setting new bevels by hand. not an all-or-nothing proposition.

When I got my first good Japanese knife, I also got an Edge Pro Apex to replace the Chef's Choice that I had been using on the Wusthofs that I'd had until that point. The difference in the edge that I got with the Edge Pro was just short of amazing. I thought I had discovered the "holy grail" of sharpening. But as time went on, and I acquired other knives, I came to realize that the Edge Pro had its limitations and design problems. The biggest problem is that the Edge Pro uses the side of the blade as a reference, which tends to cause what I call "Edge Pro tip", a widening of the bevel as it nears the tip because inability of the Edge Pro to compensate for the distal taper of a well made knife.



I also became aware that you cannot efficiently sharpen an asymmetrical blade on the Edge Pro without changing the sharpening angle every time you flip the knife. And I found that it was useless for thinning a knife.

At that point I took the plunge, bought a couple of waterstones and learned to freehand sharpen. The Edge Pro collected dust until I sold it. I could have saved time and money if I had gone down the freehand path to begin with.

I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Rick

You can alway pay someone to keep your knives ridiculously sharp, but based are you progression from Shuns to knives you are looking into, your going to need to learn to sharpen on stones. I have friends who are delighted with the edges the get from chef choice electric sharpeners. They have Shuns, Messermeisters, Wustoffs. Not my choice, and I certainly wouldn't put a Yoshikane in one. Sharpening by hand can be quite thereputic

Pensacola Tiger said:

I could have saved time and money if I had gone down the freehand path to begin with.

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Seems like great advice.

I have used an Edge Pro and now I hand sharpen.

Why hand sharpen? Faster. Not as difficult to get proficient as you think. Cheaper. More versatile. Handles the curved edges better than jigs. Can thin your blades, no jig I have seen accomplishes this at all. And based on how long it takes to just sharpen, I would hate to think how long it would take to thin a blade on a jig if possible.

It's really not even close.

My experience mirrors Pensacola Tiger's and JohnnyChance's. I still haven't gotten around to selling the Edge Pro but I'll probably never use it again. Great thing about freehanding is you can also sharpen other tools like chisels, scrapers and repair messed up scissor blades.

Freehand sharpening will get you the sharpest and brightest blades, and I'm sure you will find that once you get a knife truly sharp and not just a sawtooth edge from a knife sharpener, you won't go back.

I'll be teaching a young "foodie" friend of mine how to sharpen knives shortly. He and I were making bread and butter pickles and he was astonished at how sharp my chef's knife was compared to his, and I'm about to run that knife over the stones again because I think it's getting too dull to restore with a steel (it's a Case Chrome Vanadium knife, nothing esoteric). I guess his "knife sharpener" isn't doing that well for him, along with his one carbon steel knife going through the dishwasher when he's not there.

Once you learn it, you won't go back. A properly sharp knife makes preparation a pleasure. I've been sharpening everything in sight, it's so much nicer when all the tools work well.

I took me a while to get my knives really sharp -- most of them were acquired used and abused, and a few aren't going to stay around long as they aren't very good steel, but now it only takes a few minutes to sharpen everything up to scary sharp standards. Worst part is re-grinding bad bevels, but once you are just restoring an edge its literally three or four minutes a blade if you sharpen as soon as they lose that fabulous sharpness. If you wait until you have to hammer them through a carrot, it's gonna be a chore!

I sharpen my kitchen knives a couple times a year with more or less daily use. Professional use and you will need to sharpen a whole lot more, though.

Peter

redeemed763 said:

good knives just happen to get food on the table quicker

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I don't know about quicker. I'd say you get to enjoy the process more though.

A microwave will cook that food faster but,,

a device will give you a sharp edge, but there is more to a knife than just the cutting edge. freehand is the only way to achieve better cutting ability. that level of performance is not necessary for preparing food, but it sure is hell of a lot nicer to use.

For traditional Japanese knives, you got no other choice but to freehand. For the usual double-bevel knives, I sharpen by clamping a bamboo dowel onto the spine of the blade, and finally hold the dowel against the blade with just my fingers to adjust the micro-bevel. I think this is a semi-freehand method, freehanding with a jig.

It basically mimics this product, but this thing is fixed and not adjustable for primary/secondary bevel.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/261461496938?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

What kind of knife are you going to sharpen? Single-bevel or double-bevel??

All my knives will be double bevel, I have some shuns right now but will likely
be getting an akifusa and yokishane soon.

What stones should I get and from where?

I've had good luck with Shapton Pro's and Gesshin stones.

Doublebevel..., easy, then use this, recommended by me.
http://sharpeningmadeeasy.com/Juranitch1977Feb.htm

My special jig. This will give your knife a very precise micro-bevel within a short time, no more frustrations. It works like a semi-auto Edge-Pro.
http://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/showthread.php/18065-Cheap-Sharpening-Angle-Guide?highlight=

redeemed763 said:

All my knives will be double bevel, I have some shuns right now but will likely
be getting an akifusa and yokishane soon.

What stones should I get and from where?

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Double bevel, yes. Symmetrical, not so much.

On double bevel knives I use either Beston 500 or Gesshin 400, Bester 1200 and the Suehiro Rika 5k. Then I strop on felt with diamond.

My 2 cents....
I free hand sharpened for years, then tried an EP, and returned too free hand. IMHO, both have their pluses and minuses - my venture into the EP was out of curiosity. Personally, I fell that the EP may be more consistent, but free hand is both quicker and easier. Not a great analogy but free hand is to an EP what artisinal locally grown is to mega farm.
Also as a food enthusiast (home cook?) you can sharpen twice a year but strop daily or weekly, and enjoy scary sharp edges.
For stones I'd start with a 1k, 5k and strop ( I like rock hard felt with diamond spray). After that a 400 really rounds out the 'needs'...

So it seems like I need to get a few different stones to start with, maybe a 1000 and 5000 grit and a 400 grit down the road to help with thinning and serious jobs. Is there a reason to go with different brands at different grits like ThEoRy mentioned?

Can I just order some shapton pro stones in the aforementioned grits? Do I need to get something to keep the stones level as well?

I can't comment on current versions, but way back when some of the Shapton Pro's had a very hard / slippery feel (to me). Actually kind of odd --> the Shap Pro 400 felt really hard/slippery, and [flash forward] the Shap Glass Stone 8k felt hard & slippery, go figure.
when just starting out I'd recommend 400 grit WET DRY sand paper for flattening (lapping) your stones....and for someone new to freehand 400 grit stones are a bad idea, a mistake gets big fast

Hand sharpening is pretty easy for most medium/big blades, and if you're not into soaking stones and flattening and getting swarfy mud everywhere, there are some low-mess, low-fuss stone arrangements you might consider.

The jigs that get good results are kinda complicated and unnecessary...and the simple ones usually produce bad results, or the results get progressively worse as the edge gets thicker.

redeemed763 said:

So it seems like I need to get a few different stones to start with, maybe a 1000 and 5000 grit and a 400 grit down the road to help with thinning and serious jobs. Is there a reason to go with different brands at different grits like ThEoRy mentioned?

Can I just order some shapton pro stones in the aforementioned grits? Do I need to get something to keep the stones level as well?

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Well, every stone is different even at the same grit level. For instance the Beston 500 dishes much slower than the Gesshin 400. While the Gesshin 400 cuts faster and has better feedback than the Beston 500.

You can get DMT diasharp plates. Easy to use, don't need soaking and can even be used dry, don't need flattening, work fast even on the hardest steels, and are fairly inexpensive. They maybe don't feel as good and provide the same feedback as waterstones, though.

Course and Fine is really all you need. Add the Extra Fine to get even more keen edges. I would recommend those three to start actually. Add an Extra Course if you need to do major repairs. The Extra Extra Course removes metal fast, and is useful for flattening waterstones. Use them with gentle pressure otherwise you risk damaging the surface. The diamonds cut extremely fast regardless.

Back to the original question for a second, the biggest reason to hand sharpen compared to any machine or jig (belt sanders and grinders excepted) is that you cannot maintain the geometry of a blade with a machine or a jig. Jigs and sharpening machines will only work the very edge of a knife. As you work the edge of a blade, the edge moves back to a thicker part of the blade. If you never thin behind the edge, the blade will start to wedge. It doesn't matter if you are an occasional home cook and you only sharpen your knives every 6 months, or if you are pro who sharpens every day, unless you thin behind the edge at least every few sharpening sessions you will notice the change in geometry. It will take more force to cut food as your blade wedges into food, and in harder foods you will find that the thick part of the blade behind the edge is splitting food before the edge can cleave it cleanly.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the single most important aspect of a knife is the geometry. We take it for granted because the knives that we use start with a decent geometry and we thin them or alter the geometry to our liking. If the geometry can't be fixed you will find thread after thread about how poor the knife is (too thick behind the edge, too much stiction, overground, poor distal taper...). Even a (relatively) dull knife with a good geometry is preferably to a wedging blade that food sticks to like glue, even if it has a razor sharp edge.

That said, there are other limitations to jigs and sharpening machines that affect how well they can work the edge. Most machines were designed with softer-steel knives in mind, using a single coarse grit at a high high angle; at best you won't get the most out of your knives if you use a machine, at worst they will damage a high end knives. Jigs have limitations of how low they can go, if you want to create the proper asymmetry you need to adjust the angle every time you flip the blade, and as you sharpen around the profile of a knife the edge angle will change. Jigs will also produce a perfectly flat bevel (and most machines will produce a concave bevel) where we usually prefer a convex bevel.

You've had a few good suggestions on what stones you can start with, but I'd suggest that you might want to start a new thread on that topic. Tell us what your price range is, are you looking for a cheap starter set that you can upgrade later or a couple of good stones that you can keep and augment later, etc...

Exactly. Jigs produce great edges and poor cutters.

One should use care with coarse diamond plates and very hard steel. You might do OK with soft German style underhardened stainless, but RC62-64 steel knives with a fine edge are very very likely to acquire micro-cracks along the edge if you use diamond. This is also true of Japanese high carbon steel chisels, as any number of woodworkers can tell you. These fractures are invisible until you stress the edge in use, when small bits of the edge will break out.

This is not an issue with soft German style stainless, it just bends. Just like the edge when you chop, in fact, and that edge can easily be wiped back into alignment with a steel. You can chase a burr forever though if you use high pressure, it won't abrade off, just flops from side to side as you grind more steel off behind it.

Natural Japanese stones and soft synthetic stones sharpen not with rigidly held particles but by the sliding action of suspended grit being rolled over the stationary grit. This is entirely different in terms of stress and localized loading of the edge, and is probably the primary reason you get much sharper and longer lasting edges on hard thin Japanese style knives on soft stones.

I would only use diamond plates for roughing work, and not at the actual edge under any circumstances on hard knives. The edge you get on softer ones will, I suspect, be inferior to that from waterstones no matter what diamond grit you use. The rigid, sharp grit will always scratch more than friable rolling grit, so you get a less polished edge and the possibility of stress fractures.

I've seen several report that the first sharpening after re-setting an angle or thinning a blade all the way down to the edge results in a weak and easily damaged edge, restored by further re-sharpenings. I suspect this is due to fractures in the edge from the coarse stone and high presssure. I personally do not draw more than a minimal burr on coarse stones, I feel it's better to get close to apexing but to finish that step on a finer stone where there will be less localized pressure.

Peter

Yeh with the knives you are buying gotta learn freehand. It is all about technique not how long you spend on the stones. As home cook a Beston 500 for thinning, Bester 1200. I can get a very sharp edge good for cutting food wt. the Bester 1200 on steels like VG-10 Shuns. It can put a good edge on powder steels like the SRS-15 Akifusa. You don't really need a polishing stone for Gyuto's, it is an extra step & does not increase long term cutting performance.

Don't worry about learning freehand, you can do it.(knifesharpeningplaylist). I have found in teaching freehand most people can learn this. Have only run into a few who have a hard time & hopefully with practice will improve.