I have a few professional level knives and I currently use a pull-through sharpener for them. This works well but I wonder if it is more honing than sharpening. They just don’t seen to get that super sharp edge. Rather than taking them to a professional for the once per year sharpening, I was thinking of getting a whetstone set to give my knives a sharpening maybe twice per year. Is that overkill for what I use them for i.e. home cooking?
You may find some useful thoughts in this recent thread:
I’ve read that thread before but they don’t really talk about how to sharpen knives.
I could never get the knack for using a whetstone even though my dad, who was good at it, taught me from an early age.
Before I posted that cite I checked and saw you’d not posted to it, but I couldn’t know whether you’d already read it or not. I also didn’t recall how many cites to skilled folks teaching it were included. I hope it had some value for you, even if indirect.
The key thing for any stone is you’ve got to be extremely consistent in the angle between blade and stone. If you can’t be consistent, you’re just making a mess of the blade. The whole and entire point of the various notched or V-shaped stone holders is to make that consistent angle take far less skill.
I never could get consistent results on whetstones …
… the pull-through sharpener are notoriously damaging to the blade, as they basically rip out small parts of it.
I did a bit of research and finally bougth 2 pc. of <$5 Arkansas ceramic honing rods, drilled 2 holes (10mm) at 20 ° in a wooden board to emulate the rather pricey Spyderco sharpening system:
here the Arkansas rods:
Arkansas Sharpeners AC46 Ceramic 11.5" Sharpening Stick
.
long story short: I now can 100% consistently sharpen every knife to laser beam sharpness … even some crappy sheetmetal knives. It hardly ever takes more than 10 strokes by side, so it’s normally less than 1 min. per knife.
Needless to say, I am very happy, as I saved $$$ (about 90% vs. the Spyderco sharpener) and did a bit of smart DIY to great success
why does it work so well? … b/c you just run your knife at a 90° angle (=upright) through it … once x side … so you don’t have to have any special ninja-skills (I sure don’t have those 
)
It’s a knife sharpener AND WiFi router!
So, I learned to sharpen by watching videos by Rex Krueger on YouTube. For years I struggled with sharpening and finally cracked it by finally understanding how to tell if you were making progress. The trick for me was to keep grinding until you feel a burr and keep going until you feel the burr all along the edge. Then flip over and do the same on the other side until you feel the burr has been moved back to the other side all along its edge. Then move to your next stone. In my case, I use a double-sided diamond plate I picked up from Amazon for $20 which has 400 grit on one side and 1000 on the other. I then strop on a piece of leather charged with green chromium dioxide polishing compound.
Burr on, burr off, is the gist of sharpening.
For knives I’ve used the already-mentioned Spyderco Tri-Angle set for a couple decades now (they cost almost nothing, considering how long they last).
For broadheads I use a mill file free hand, and get the heads plenty sharp. It took maybe 50 sharpenings to get the task-specific motor skills down pat.
The first two videos are from the same guy, using the same methods, but testing different products.
He had trouble with the Spyderco, which made me feel better about never having been satisfied with it. He also had excellent luck with whetstones, despite being new to them.
I’ve always had good luck with whetstones, and found a lot of other sharpeners difficult. Sometimes i think they are damaging the edge more than sharpening. I guess I’ll stick with whetstones.
Power sharpeners and even simpler devices like the rolling sharpener make knife sharpening easy. It’s not terribly difficult to sharpen a knife with a stone or diamond hone. I kind of enjoy taking a couple of minutes to sharpen a blade before use, but there’s nothing particularly better or worse about it compared to sharpening devices that will quickly grind both sides of a blade at once with a consistent angle.
Adam has a pretty good take, the best sharpener is the one you use.
… and yes, the first 30 sec. of this vid. brings me to another HUGE advantage of “my antenna system” …
no need to prep, soak stone, clean, wet again, move up to the next stone … etc… that always turned out to be hugely messy
I just run my knives through the antennae vertically and be doing my cooking already, while my whetstone (which I also have) would still be bubbling in the waterbath, waiting to be used and deposit its sludge over the assorted newspaper that I put up for that reason on the kitchen table…
the simplest tool that gets the job done for me …
The antenna system is great. Provided you can hold the knife dead vertical every time while pulling through on one or the other side. I much prefer something smaller in scale that helps hold the knife blade dead vertical.
it doesn’t have to be dead-vertical …
“ballpark vertical” gets it razor-sharp
I saw a few of those knife-specialists-vids on YT (sorry no link), where they measured the grind of brand new knives, and those were easily off by 3-5° from the factory … (left side vs. right side)
so no reason to overthink it - and be more catholic than the pope…
but yeah … there are many ways to skin a cat …
huh, I’ve never tried boiling a whetstone. I agree it’s a bit of a mess. I usually put the whetstone on a piece of paper towel, put a couple drops of oil on the stone, and start slicing away. It doesn’t take any longer to set up than the spiderco thing. But I do end up with a greasy mess of a paper towel or two at the end.
I couldn’t get the Spyderco system to work well at all. I gave mine away. There’s a guy in town who sharpens knives for a cheap rate and I have him do it. I just don’t have the touch.
I’ve got the Work Sharp sharpener and it does a decent job. Not totally idiot proof, there is some technique involved, and as with any belt grinding you can do a lot of damage really fast if you’re not careful, but once you figure it out your knives will end up pretty sharp. “Shave hair off your arm” sharp at least.
not boiling it, either … the bubbling was a reference to submerging the solid-sponge the whetstone is and have its pores fill with water, hence they bubble (water displacing the air within the stone)