I’m fine. How do YOU do, Blunt Forks?
Yours,
Sharpen Knives
I keep all my knives and tools extremely sharp. A cutting tool is useless unless it cuts well. The things you need to make your knife sharp are: 1) An angle guide of some kind; 2) Graduated abrasives from coarse to fine; and 3) A flat surface.
I learned how to sharpen a knife from my dad, and then later read the Razor Edge Book of Sharpening and found that some of what I’d learned wasn’t optimal. There’s also the Scary Sharp method, which has a lot of overlap with the recommendations in the REBoS.
If you have a very dull or abused knife, you’ll need a fairly coarse or fast-cutting abrasive to re-establish a good blade profile and initial bevel. If you have your standard “kitchen drawer” knife that never got sharpened since you bought it, you probably don’t need a really aggressive grit, but it will take some time to do the initial bevel.
Most of the kitchen sharpeners use ceramic or metal alloy disks to “sharpen” knives. The problem is that they often chew up the edge and don’t protect the blade profile. If you’ve used one of those for a while, then your initial sharpen time will be somewhere between a “fucked up” knife and an otherwise well-treated but unsharpened knife.
Moving up through a few grits, coarse to fine, will get your blade progressively sharper. It really doesn’t matter whether you use sharpening stones, ceramic rods, or sandpaper. The important things are keeping a constant angle, and throughly polishing the blade at each step.
The Razor Edge book has you check for a burr on the side facing away from the polishing surface to determine whether you’ve polished through to the edge. Scary Sharp uses a marker to check. Both work.
After you do that first sharpening it’ll be pretty easy to keep the edge in shape. You can touch it up with stropping or steeling. It’ll only need a real sharpening — probably just with the 2 finer grits — every couple of months, as long as you treat your knives right. That means no glass cutting boards, cutting on plates, or cutting on hard counter tops. Don’t throw them in a drawer with other cutlery to bang around and dull the edges. Don’t put them in the dish rack with other stuff after washing. Not only is it dangerous, but it’ll again bung up the edge.
I personally use sharpening stones, but if I had an established work area, I’d probably move to Scary Sharp’s glass or granite base and sandpaper, because lapping stones to keep them flat quickly becomes a pain in the ass, especially with the more heavily-used coarse stone. I use standard sharpening stones I got from the hardware store. As long as the quality is consistent and you can trust the grit ratings, it really doesn’t matter what you use.
I have enough experience by now to do sharpening freehand, but I prefer a good guide. You can get these from lots of different places; just about every sharpening shop sells them along with stones. Ceramic rods like the Spyderco ones are set at an angle, so as long as you hold your knife as perfectly vertical as possible through the stroke, you should get a decent consistent angle.
If you steel or strop your edge, you need to pay attention to the angle too. Don’t get sloppy, especially with a steel or similar honer, or you’ll mess up the edge and have to re-sharpen more frequently.
I found a YouTube video of someone using the Scary Sharp method to sharpen a few different knives. Pretty boring to watch, but I agree with pretty much all of his supplementary notes.
I just grind them with my teeth. My knives will slice diamond.
Reading threw a few of these and I agree more with **Sleel/B] though I also would like to just give this piece of refence from the zombiesquad peoplehttp://zombiehunters.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=72749&
I buy a new kitchen knife at Walmart. When it gets too dull, throw it out and buy a new one. $15 every few years is worth it.
I don’t, the butler does it as a matter of course old boy…
The Butler, in the kitchen, with the whet stone? 
Jeeves, a bit doddery what, but a fine old retainer don’t ya know. Just wish he’d get out of the habit of doffing his cap.
Thought of this thread last night. We had pizza (homemade, yumm) and used our nice pizza cutting wheel gadget. Which we have sharpened along with our knives. It is so cool having a razor sharp pizza slicer.
+1 on this. A few licks with this and I can use my knife to shave.
I learned this in the Cub Scouts about fifty years ago.
I have three whetstones. One is coarse, one medium and one fine. Once I establish a good edge, I can touch it up when needed with the fine stone.
This is low-tech, but I heard it from someone who claimed to be a good chef. Works fine.
Take a mousepad. Take some auto-sanding-type sandpaper, of different grits (don’t remember which), glue them to either side.
Works a treat, and gives you a nice little beveled edge because of the give in the foam backing of the mousepad (I don’t know what the term is – my knives are all cheap as hell so I don’t know what anything about sharpening terminology).
Another vote for the Spyderco Sharpmaker. Another key thing to do is get a steel and use it each time you pull a knife from the block. Never mind whether a steel hones, trues, aligns or whatever - done faithfully, it can prolong the time between needing to actually sharpen the blade.
As you might guess, my knives scare people. That’s fine - their alleged “knives” scare me.