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On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 01:21:37PM +0000, Jakob Whitfield wrote: > Buy a steel and learn how to use it - touch up the edge on your knives > every few times you use them. This keeps the edge on them, and means > you don't have to sharpen (or get them sharpened) so often. I've heard > good things about cook's choice sharpeners - pull-through is the way > to go if you're at all inexperienced, as it's easy to destroy the edge > with a whetstone if you don't know what you're doing. (On that note, > can anyone recommend anywhere decent in town to get knives sharpened? > I know some of the big department stores get people from the > knife-makers in around Christmas, but I always seem to miss them). I got my knives sharpened once by a man who came door to door with a truck-mounted sharpening wheel. He made a horrible job - he put a 37 degree slope on one side and 28 on the other, it took me WEEKS with an oilstone to get my Global Santoku back to 30 degrees on each side. I like the concept but I'd want to be sure that the people sharpening knew what they were doing. Knife manufacturer reps might well do. The Welsh Hippie who buggered my blade up didn't really seem to. It really isn't that difficult to learn to use a stone. I'd recommend a stone mounted in a box with a hook at the front - that way you can hook it over the edge of a worksurface and it stays in place, while you work the blade forward and back along its length while using your thumbs to maintain a 30 degree angle. The japanese water-stones are easier to work with than oilstones potentially - they're softer so you always have freshly-exposed particles to grind/polish with - but they do form a sort of slurry of ground stone and water. This is arguably an excellent grinding paste though, and probably easier to clean up than spilled linseed oil. The best bit is, once you've put the work in to get a razor-sharp stone finish, using the steel every time you use the knife is enough to keep it in great condition. I don't trust the pull-through kind of sharpener with discs of metal. I once massacred a knife using one (as a child) and haven't used one since. /joelThere's stuff above here
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