My mother-in-law has a set of cheap knives, specifically this set.
She’s been complaining for a while that they’re dull, and Mr. Athena ended up buying her a sharpening stone. After trying it, she said it didn’t work. Mr. Athena asked her to show him how she did it, and she proceeded to draw the blade across the stone, completely perpendicular. In other words, she did a REALLY good job at dulling the knife. (and when Mr. Athena told her she was doing it wrong, in classic old-lady-I’m-the-mother manner she INSISTED that’s how she ALWAYS sharpened knives and it’s ALWAYS worked in the past :rolleyes:)
Anyway, he brought the knives home so we could try sharpening them with our electric sharpener, and I’m looking at these things wondering if it’s even a possibility that they can be sharpened. Aren’t most inexpensive knives made out of something that can’t be sharpened?
Either way, I think we’re going to buy her another set because it would take me 2 hours to get these things sharp. I’m just curious if there’s a way to tell if they’re the type of metal that can be sharpened at all.
Subscribing to this thread because if there are knives that can’t be sharpened, I don’t want to embarrass myself by taking them to the hardware store for sharpening.
Any knife can be sharpened – even the cheapest knives with the cheapest metals can have a sharp edge that’s just fine for ordinary kitchen duty. The problem is that those knives won’t hold that edge for long. Really cheap and nasty knives will go from reasonably sharp to very dull in a very short amount of time. As in, if you start with a freshly sharpened but cheap and nasty knife, it’ll be noticeably dull by the time you finish carving up a chicken.
Those knives are made out of 420 stainless steel, which is standard for cheap knives. Better knives will use better materials, and will also use various methods to harden the edge. I’ve got a set of similar knives, and they’re acceptable, but not great. They’re ok for chopping veggies when my better knives are covered in raw meat juices. I don’t bother to sharpen my cheap knives very often, since it’s a waste of effort, but they do get a good stropping every time before I use them.
So you probably can sharpen them back to where they were originally, but it may not be worth it. It’ll take a lot of time and wear on whatever you use to sharpen them. Probably better just to get another cheapass set of knives.
With simple edges like that, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a knife that can’t be sharpened. What you may have instead is a knife that won’t stay sharp very long after you put an edge on it. Also a problem with cheap steel is that you lose more metal when honing, so that it can’t be sharpened many times before the shape of the blade starts to change.
So it’s not a factor of ‘can’t,’ but rather a case of ‘not worth the time.’ Which seems to be where you’ve already ended up
Take them to a pro, they’re cheap (the pros), generally friendly and knowledgeable and can grind a new edge onto your knives. As long as you’re not dealing with serrated knives, they should be able to help.
Except that taking them to a pro to be sharpened properly is going to cost probably five bucks a knife. But the set linked to in the OP costs $16 new (for three knives). At that point, it would cheaper probably just to replace them.
It’s easy to use and works well on my cheap knives. What I did notice was that one knife took a lot longer than the others to sharpen. In the end, though, my knifes ended up useful again. Probably not as sharp as new or professionally done - though repeated sharpening seems to improve them still - but easier than using a flat stone and the tool is cheap. I don’t know if I’d risk using that kind of thing on an expensive knife, but it’s worth a try.
Within limits, what steel knives are made out of is less important than whether that steel has been properly heat treated. Of course, when talking about really cheap cutlery the chances are that it has not. Victorinox, makers of Swiss Army knives and kitchen cutlery, uses a steel similar to 12C27. This isn’t an exotic or expensive alloy. Victorinox blades are, however, properly heat treated. This results in knives that are easy to sharpen, hold their edge reasonably well, and don’t cost a tremendous amount of money. Buck Knives, in the US, also uses pretty prosaic alloys in most of their knives. Buck always does a superb job on the heat treating, though, which is why their knives are known for holding an edge (and other makers sub-contract heat treatment to them).
So, your MIL’s knives can be resharpened. How long they stay sharp will be infuenced by whether they were (by chance) properly heat treated and whether your MIL maintains them properly. Chances are she doesn’t use a steel to re-align the edge and I’ll bet she runs themt through the dishwasher.
The best sharpening tool in the world, IMO, is the Spyderco Sharpmaker. It will do knives, chisels, drill bits, scissors, and most anything made out of steel that needs to be sharp. If you spend the extra $ and buy the diamond-coated rods, you won’t regret it. These allow you to quickly remove large amounts of metal when you are sharpening something that is completely blunt or you want to re-profile an edge to a different angle. In addition, it will sharpen serrated blades back to factory edge sharp.
The Sharpmaker really will give you an edge every bit as good as or better than a commercial resharpening. At $5 or more per knife for commercial resharpening, the Sharpmaker pays for itself in short order.
I’ll second the vote for a Spyderco Sharpmaker. Mine lives in the kitchen, where it’s easy to pull out every so often and give the knives a little grooming.
If you let knives get all nasty and dull, it’s a lot of work to bring them back from the dead, but a few quick strokes through the Sharpmaker every couple of weeks is pretty painless.
It also does a credible job on scalloped and serrated edges.
As far as MY knives go, they rarely need sharpening because I use a steel before each and every use, and when they do need sharpening I get them professionally sharpened. And I do have an electric sharpener that I use if I need a little touch-up. So I have that side of things taken care of.
And you’ve all reinforced my first guess of “let’s just buy her another set.” She doesn’t actually use them all that much (most of the time her idea of “cooking” is pulling something out of the freezer and heating it up), so a new set of $15 knives every couple of years will do just fine.
Buying new is a valid choice. FTR, though, even fairly cheap modern knives are light years ahead of what most people used since man learned to use metal. Old knives, especially the made by the village blacksmith variety, were pretty crude metalurgically. Workmanship varied wildly. Even after the industrial revolution and mass production, knives were no great shakes compared to the best available commercially today.
