What is sharpening?

In Japan, old people has habit of sharpening. Every house have sharpening stones. They know naturally that knives need sharpening. It's no doubt. 

Blacksmiths say value of knives are created by sharpening. If users don't sharpen their knives, the value is gone.

Every knife will get dull after using. You cannot cut well after edge get dull. Sharpening makes edge sharp again.

Nowadays, people don't sharpen their knives by stones. Someone changes knives after using as one time use tool. Someone uses sharpeners. It's easy to recover the sharpness. But knives cannot be cut well, after you repeat many times.

It works few times. You need to do reshape the blade finally. I don't see any sharpener can do reshape. You need to do it manually by stones.

My customers bring their knives. Most of them are this condition. I will do reshape and make sharp edge.

There is 3 step sharpening method. 1st step use coarse grit stones to make shape. 2nd step use middle grit stones to make edge. 3rd step use fine grit sones to polish the edge. 

Beginner of sharpening misunderstand that fine grit stones are better than coarse stones, because fine one is more expensive than coarse one. In the fact, coarse stones is more important than fine if knife is not sharpened long time. Making shape process is most important. If shape is not good, cannot make good edge, polishing is meaningless.

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There are many topics about sharpening. This article is the first one.

Conclusions:

The value of knives are created by sharpening. Don't use knives as single-use tools.

 

Hiroshi Takeuchi