PM steel touch-up: strop or stone?

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Paraffin

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What do users here of knives with the harder PM steels like R2 and HAP40 do for light touch-ups between sharpening sessions? Or do you just skip the idea of a "touch up," and assume the edge will hold until the next sharpening session?

With my carbon knives and softer German stainless knives, I'm used to doing touch-ups by stropping on green compound-loaded leather, mounted on a wood block. Works great with these knives for extending the edge life between sharpening. But I'm not convinced it's doing anything useful with these harder PM steels.

I guess I could try diamond spray or paste on leather?

Or I could just walk the knife over to the room where I keep my sharpening stuff for a few light stropping passes on a 6k stone. But that's less convenient than something I can use in the kitchen for quick touch-ups. And yeah, these hard PM steels don't need touch-ups nearly as often, but I'm just used to doing it before a major cooking session. Maybe I need to re-think that.
 
Or I could just walk the knife over to the room where I keep my sharpening stuff for a few light stropping passes on a 6k stone.

I've found this to be the best approach. I'm not a fan of soft substrate stropping. I also use Knives and stones sand paper holder. That way you can dial the grit down to the micron for each steel, HT... Also, to extend the edge and clean off any folded steel, use both edge trailing and edge leading stropping strokes to leaves a grabby x scratch pattern.
 
I wouldnt call R2/SG2 that hard in most heat treatments. Hap40 and Srs15 are usually quite a bit harder.

Nonetheless they all respond well to stropping on diamond loaded balsa or on a fine stone IME.

Never tried CrOx but I suspect that it would work OK. Give ot a try and let us know.

I have read arguments that the loading abrasive needs to be harder than the hardest carbide in the steel. To my mind this argument assumes that the abrasive needs to cut the carbide. I don't know whether this actually happens, but I'm a bit skeptical (happy to be proven wrong), so I don't know whether 0.5 um diamond is any better than CrOx or not.
 

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