Is freehand sharpening worth it?

[LKH9]

What in the hell are you talking about?
So, you are saying that 90+ percent of the members on any given knife forum know nothing about knives? The makers? The vendors?
I'm glad you're here to tell us all about it.
Please do tell us more about how little we know.

Hey hey, calm down! You must have misunderstood my meaning I suppose. I'm talking about my own little world here. I'll explain this clearly, I said I can't find a real person out of the net who actually loves knives.

 

[knyfeknerd]

Hey hey, calm down! You must have misunderstood my meaning I suppose. I'm talking about my own little world here. I'll explain this clearly, I said I can't find a real person out of the net who actually loves knives.

OK cool. Some things are lost in translation.

 

[LKH9]

Saying we knife enthusiasts here should be like 1 family, why fight among ourselves... We are only the minority on this planet, should be kind towards each other.

 

[purplemutant]

My stone and carbon steel knives came in today. :happy1:

I will post more once I have gotten around to trying out the stone. Thanks everyone for pushing me into freehand sharpening and helping me pick decent set of affordable stones.

 

[malexthekid]

My stone and carbon steel knives came in today. :happy1:

I will post more once I have gotten around to trying out the stone. Thanks everyone for pushing me into freehand sharpening and helping me pick decent set of affordable stones.

Enjoy, have fun with them, as everyone has said, watch Jon''s videos on youtube to learn.

And mostly be careful, I have only been into this knife scene for a year (well at least from the point of owning and sharpening) but have managed to purchase myself 5 gyutos within the year (though I now have a self imposed/wife imposed ban on purchases for the near future). They are a joy to cut with, and helped increase my love for cooking.

 

[ThEoRy]

I am not necessary talking about knife sharpening, but your driving example is simply wrong. You can learn 90% of driving skills in Dodge Neon (or bloody Yugo) that are DIRECTLY related to Viper...
You obliviously are not a car guy

You are oblivious to obvious vocabulary mistakes. lol :tease: As for the Viper reference it still stands. That missing percentage is where the action is. The high performance. It's where you learn to raise and refine a fine even burr until elimination. It's where you learn asymmetrical sharpening it's where you take a knife up to higher grits and it can hold the edge.

What's the point of learning to sharpen a cutco up to 5k when it fails after one cut? What did you learn? What feelings or emotions are you going through? It's like, "****, what am I doing wrong?!" Then you get discouraged, wash rinse repeat. You may learn some muscle memory, but that's about it. How do I know this? BECAUSE I'VE BEEN THERE! Why is my knife dull? Why am I not getting good results? What am I doing wrong? I JUST SHARPENED IT! The minute I dove in on my Tanaka I had instant proper feedback and was able to adjust accordingly to achieve great results. I'm not telling everyone to go out and buy a $600 knife or that that's the only way to learn. But I will say mostly everything I learned about proper sharpening happened on nicer blades.

Who the **** drives a Viper at 35 mph anyway? If you want to learn how to drive a viper, you have to drive a viper. It's a different beast. Just like knives, there's a huge difference. I sharpen cheapos up to 500 and maybe strop on a 1200 then back on the 500. I would never do that on my work knives. Ever.

 

[purplemutant]

Enjoy, have fun with them, as everyone has said, watch Jon''s videos on youtube to learn.

And mostly be careful, I have only been into this knife scene for a year (well at least from the point of owning and sharpening) but have managed to purchase myself 5 gyutos within the year (though I now have a self imposed/wife imposed ban on purchases for the near future). They are a joy to cut with, and helped increase my love for cooking.

I have been watching his videos. Good stuff. I will have to be careful with spending. Once I get good at sharpening I will probably decide I need more stones even if what I have is working fine. I am not too worried about expensive knife purchases. I would be more worried about cheap used knives. I am sure it will be mighty tempting to pick up used/abused knives to try to bring back to life. $5-$10 for a knife isn't that bad, until you start buying a whole bunch of them :lol2:

 

[Mr.Wizard]

What in the hell are you talking about?

I believe LKH9 is using old internet slang from a time when Facebook didn't exist and people enjoyed often-anonymous alter-egos like Mr.Wizard or Lo Pan. In that time "real life" was clearly understood to mean not "jacked in to cyberspace" or "riding the information superhighway" or some other now-archaic expression. :2cents:

 

[knyfeknerd]

I believe LKH9 is using old internet slang from a time when Facebook didn't exist and people enjoyed often-anonymous alter-egos like Mr.Wizard or Lo Pan. In that time "real life" was clearly understood to mean not "jacked in to cyberspace" or "riding the information superhighway" or some other now-archaic expression. :2cents:

Ahh the wonders of the interweb!

 

[purplemutant]

Success! :happy1::knife:

I tried out my stone with the old hickory carbon steel paring knife I ordered just for this purpose. The knife came sharpened from the factory; but it wasn't super sharp. I like to do paper cutting as a test of sharpness. I like using receipt paper because it's thin and I always have some spare receipts in my wallet. The factory edge had some trouble cutting paper. Now it cuts paper quite nicely. It's not crazy scary sharp, but it passed the test. Not bad for my first try at sharpening with decent stones. The youtube videos from Japanese knife imports were very helpful. The only issues I ran into were keeping the angle consistent and knowing when to switch from 1000 grit to 6000 grit. Even without the sharpie trick I could tell my angle was off. Regardless the knife is sharper than it was out of the box.

How sharp should the knife be before I switch to the finer grit?

For now I think I will keep using the sharpmaker on the main kitchen knives until I have more sharpening experience under my belt. Thanks again everyone for all your help

 

[LKH9]

When you have raised a burr and removed them, there you can switch to finer stone. Fine stone is meant to polish the edge only, so do it with Very Light pressure only. After that you will raise anothrr burr, but this time is much finer, maybe harder to feel with fingers depending on how fine the stone is.

 

[Benuser]

You will go to the next stone when the burr can't get refined any further on the previous one, when it only flips after a single stroke with the least pressure, and you can't get any further improvement.

 

[krx927]

You are oblivious to obvious vocabulary mistakes. lol :tease: As for the Viper reference it still stands. That missing percentage is where the action is. The high performance. It's where you learn to raise and refine a fine even burr until elimination. It's where you learn asymmetrical sharpening it's where you take a knife up to higher grits and it can hold the edge.

What's the point of learning to sharpen a cutco up to 5k when it fails after one cut? What did you learn? What feelings or emotions are you going through? It's like, "****, what am I doing wrong?!" Then you get discouraged, wash rinse repeat. You may learn some muscle memory, but that's about it. How do I know this? BECAUSE I'VE BEEN THERE! Why is my knife dull? Why am I not getting good results? What am I doing wrong? I JUST SHARPENED IT! The minute I dove in on my Tanaka I had instant proper feedback and was able to adjust accordingly to achieve great results. I'm not telling everyone to go out and buy a $600 knife or that that's the only way to learn. But I will say mostly everything I learned about proper sharpening happened on nicer blades.

Who the **** drives a Viper at 35 mph anyway? If you want to learn how to drive a viper, you have to drive a viper. It's a different beast. Just like knives, there's a huge difference. I sharpen cheapos up to 500 and maybe strop on a 1200 then back on the 500. I would never do that on my work knives. Ever.

I see that you immediately chew on the candy I threw in the text, although this time I will refrain myself from inserting emotions...

My opinion about the car example and the rest still stands. If you would at least pics some other car, but Viper...

I am not arguing about the sharpening part though.

 

[ThEoRy]

Regular car vs high performance car. Regular knife vs high performance knife. Better?

 

[Keith Sinclair]

My stone and carbon steel knives came in today. :happy1:

I will post more once I have gotten around to trying out the stone. Thanks everyone for pushing me into freehand sharpening and helping me pick decent set of affordable stones.

Great with some practice & Jon's video's you will be getting sharp edges on the carbon in no time. And you are right you can freehand all kinds of blades on a stone.

 

[Salty dog]

I'm a freehander and don't have much more to say except I don't waste my time on the stainless house knives. They go right to the Tru-Hone machine.

 

[Andrey V]

The sharpmaker is a one size fits all approach that on the whole will give you a good edge with a little practice. It does however constrain you to that one size.

Freehand gives you a greater ability to experiment and match the edge to the intended purpose. Also after repeated sharpenings the edge will get thicker and stones give you the ability to correct for this matching the original geometry, or adjusting it for improved performance. The 15 dps back bevel isn't low enough to do this with kitchen knives.

If you compare a train to a car, a train can only go to certain places but will get you pretty close to where you want to be without much effort. A car can get you exactly where you want to be, but you need to learn to drive and until you know the route you might get lost and end up further away.

So it depends if you're happy being close enough, or want to learn a new skill that has the potential to get your edges right where you want them to be.

Awesome example, btw. 👍👍👍
And please don't forget the huge difference in steels, geometry, hardness ( i mean carbons first if all). There's a huge difference between sharpening source as well, Jnats give much better results compared to synthetic stones, then reinforcing of the cutting edge.... So all-in-all: pocket knives are not pro- kitchen knives. Everybody is free to choose it's own way, but is asked: here is the answer. Guys, full respect, you give very "calm" answers compared to those on other forums.

 

[Roger]

I don't regret a second getting into freehand sharpening. Awesome results, great fun and learning. It may be a little tough at the beginning to get it but once you're getting a good hand it's really cool to do and it's quite good at clearing my mind of anything else when I'm at it.

 

[mhpr262]

it's quite good at clearing my mind of anything else when I'm at it.

Same here, it's almost meditative.