# first knife sharpening



## FireDragon76 (Jan 14, 2016)

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?res...authkey=!AEs6sgke53QPKXw&v=3&ithint=photo,jpg

Here is a picture of an old Forgecraft knife I have been sharpening. My dad loaned it to me as he no longer uses it. It's the first knife I have sharpened freehand in a long while. I started off with a 320-grit Chinese stone I got from the local Asian grocery, then worked on a diamond coated hone I got at Harbor Freight. I also did a bit of blade thinning by going really shallow (10 degrees or so) and tried to work on the tip a little to get it slightly thinner. It's still not quite as sharp as I would like but it has no problem chopping semi-hard vegetables like ginger.

He also loaned me a Forgecraft butcher knife/slicer, but it's sharp enough that all I have been doing is stropping it with a little green paste.


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## Danieru (Jan 15, 2016)

Is the picture from after sharpening? If it is the edge looks not right to me. Seems like there was a lot of wobbling during sharpening and it was not brought to an apex properly. It is somewhat hard to tell though with the image quality and what not...


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## FireDragon76 (Jan 15, 2016)

It's from after sharpening.

I have trouble telling how sharp it is, since most of my fingers have calluses. I tried a paper test and it will slice paper with a little force, but not so good for cutting.


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## chinacats (Jan 15, 2016)

Can't see anything in the pic...guessing you didn't get all the burr off on the 320. Does it cut better if the knife is tilted either way while cutting paper?


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## FireDragon76 (Jan 15, 2016)

I think the shoulders of the edge are slightly rounded. I suspect it cuts food because the blade is thin, not because the edge is particularly sharp.


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## ThEoRy (Jan 15, 2016)

Round shoulders equals wobbling.


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## FireDragon76 (Jan 15, 2016)

Could not soaking a stone long enough cause this? 

The stone I have has instructions in Chinese only. Not speaking Chinese, I guessed it was "splash and go", so I could only apply water to the surface after washing it for a minute. But... I let it soak today in water for twenty minutes and the texture of the stone changed quite a bit.


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## psfred (Jan 15, 2016)

Concentrate on holding the knife at a constant angle as you move it back and forth on the stone -- until you are doing that, nothing else really matters.

If you don't get a soaker stone well soaked, it won't keep a puddle of water on it as you sharpen. I've never seen the surface texture change much, but a dry stone loads up with swarf pretty quick and won't cut well. Splash and go stones keep a puddle of water on top just by pouring some on, it doesn't soak in nearly as much as with soakers.

Work on holding the angle constant, once you achieve that the knife will suddenly get much sharper.... Took me a while, still have to watch that I don't roll it up and down.

Peter


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## FireDragon76 (Jan 16, 2016)

I'm pretty sure the stone needs a lot of soaking. If I put water on it, it absorbs water instantly.

The wet Chinese stones made some mud once I soaked them. I was trying to use a western style sharpening stroke.


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## psfred (Jan 16, 2016)

If the water just vanishes, it's a soaker.

Doesn't matter what style of sharpening you are doing, you must hold the blade at a constant angle from one end of the stroke to the other, and maintain it when you move to another section of the blade. This means, of course, you must rotate and lift the handle a bit as you sharpen the curved section of the blade to maintain the same angle all the way up to the tip.

If you change the angle of the bevel as you sharpen, you will get a severely rounded bevel, and even if you have a nice polished apex it won't cut well. Bevel needs to be perfectly flat.

I adjust the height of the stones so that I can pivot my shoulder while holding my hand perfectly level. Once I learned to do that, my knives got sharper. I still use a guide for chisels and plane blades though, I get better results.

Peter


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## FireDragon76 (Jan 16, 2016)

What's the difference between rounded shoulders and a convex edge?

My brother sharpened the knives previously, and there wasn't much of an edge when I got hold of them.

I am going to stick with learning to freehand, but now my expectations have been reset. I have a few other junk knives I can practice with. I will advise my dad just to sell the Forgecrafts on Ebay as is.


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## ThEoRy (Jan 16, 2016)

Practicing on junk knives is a frustrating and possibly futile experience. Why don't you just buy a relatively inexpensive yet proper Japanese blade to practice on?


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## Pensacola Tiger (Jan 16, 2016)

FireDragon76 said:


> What's the difference between rounded shoulders and a convex edge?



Fred didn't say rounded "shoulders", but rounded "apex".Big difference. A rounded apex will never be really sharp.


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## psfred (Jan 17, 2016)

I don't have the ability to draw a picture at the moment, but a rounded shoulder well away from the edge is more cosmetic than anything else, but rounding the bevel up to the edge gives you an apex with a rounded profile, not a straight sided "v", which is required to cut well. Imagine the edge looking like a Gothic arch - gonna be hard to cut much of anything with it.

If that Forgecraft has been maintained with a steel for many years, which is quite possible, even with a clean apex you may have a knife rather thick behind the edge and it won't cut well -- in firm materials like carrots the edge will not actually cut, the blade can be thick enough that once you start cutting you are wedging the food apart with the fat blade and the edge is not in contact anymore, it's suspended in a crack. Cut a thick slice from a carrot, if it crunches instead of smoothly slicing, the knife is too fat.

The cure for that is to re-grind the knife blade thinner from about half way down from the spine to very near the edge. This is called "thinning" in this neck of the woods, and old knives with a lot of use often need it. In fact some knives greatly benefit from thinning when brand new.

Stick with decent quality steel for learning to sharpen, you are very unlikely to do anything to a knife that cannot be fixed unless you use very coarse stones with excessive vigor at very bad angles. Low quality soft stainless cannot be sharpened to decent edge that will last more than a few cuts, and behaves differently on the stones. You wont' learn much that's really useful but can develop bad habits.

A Tojiro DP gyuto 210 mm long costs less than $60 on Amazon. A 180 is less. Either will be a perfectly adequate knife, and is sharp enough out of the box you will be able to tell if you are getting it sharper or not. Very decent knives, not that difficult to sharpen well, and cheap enough you won't feel a great loss if you never quite get it right. 

Peter


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## aboynamedsuita (Jan 17, 2016)

psfred said:


> A Tojiro DP gyuto 210 mm long costs less than $60 on Amazon. A 180 is less. Either will be a perfectly adequate knife, and is sharp enough out of the box you will be able to tell if you are getting it sharper or not. Very decent knives, not that difficult to sharpen well, and cheap enough you won't feel a great loss if you never quite get it right.
> 
> Peter



Good recommendation. I believe the Tojiro DP has been suggested to the OP before, may want to give that some serious thought FireDragon


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## ThEoRy (Jan 17, 2016)

Seriously.


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## brainsausage (Jan 17, 2016)

In all seriousness though-

seriously


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## daveb (Jan 17, 2016)

tjangula said:


> ...I believe the Tojiro DP has been suggested to the OP before...




I recall suggestions that an unknown stone from an unknown source that cost less than two egg rolls might not be the best entry point for sharpening. Yet here we are.


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## Benuser (Jan 17, 2016)

psfred said:


> I don't have the ability to draw a picture at the moment, but a rounded shoulder well away from the edge is more cosmetic than anything else, but rounding the bevel up to the edge gives you an apex with a rounded profile, not a straight sided "v", which is required to cut well. Imagine the edge looking like a Gothic arch - gonna be hard to cut much of anything with it.
> 
> If that Forgecraft has been maintained with a steel for many years, which is quite possible, even with a clean apex you may have a knife rather thick behind the edge and it won't cut well -- in firm materials like carrots the edge will not actually cut, the blade can be thick enough that once you start cutting you are wedging the food apart with the fat blade and the edge is not in contact anymore, it's suspended in a crack. Cut a thick slice from a carrot, if it crunches instead of smoothly slicing, the knife is too fat.
> 
> ...


Very good on the need of thinning after long years of steeling abuse. Just want to add that you should expect in that scenario a lot of fatigued steel as well. Normally when thinning you don't go as far as to raise a burr. In case you suspect fatigued steel, raise a fat one on the lowest grit.


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## Jovidah (Jan 17, 2016)

daveb said:


> I recall suggestions that an unknown stone from an unknown source that cost less than two egg rolls might not be the best entry point for sharpening. Yet here we are.


I have to commend you on your patience as a moderator. 

In regards to the OP. It's hard to diagnose things like this from afar. But what really set me up was watching some of the 'sharpening tutorial'-playlists on youtube. Those by Jon (from Japanese Knife Imports) and Korin definitly helped me a lot in getting my technique straight and getting more consistent result.

But likewise I'd also recommend you to at least get some half-decent stones. I think the stones by King (1000 & 6000 grit) stone are often recommended as a nice cheap starter set that can still achieve great results while only costing you fairly little. At least that way you know you're not wasting a lot of effort on stones that couldn't get anything sharp.


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## Benuser (Jan 17, 2016)

I would start thinning with automotive sandpaper on linen, P120. Use a backing of hard rubber or soft wood. Edge trailing only.


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