Best and fastest way to sharpen kitchen knives?

I use plastic and don't find the maintenance to be any big deal. Marshmallow fluff cutting boards though I hear are really easy on knife edges. 😬 Plain edge knives on ceramic plates though will get you sharpening every time. But if I want a steak I will have to sharpen the steak knives.
 
Buy a $30 1000 grit whetstone and learn how to hand sharpen. Buying more equipment is useless. Most any stone will work, but you have to know how to work.
 
If you get it sharp, then you figured it out. Why do you expect it to stay sharp after you use it?

I keep a small diamond stone in the knife drawer and take a coupling strokes everytime I take a knife out.

As mentioned take a look at your cutting boards and your technique.
 
Get the ken onion with the blade grinder attachment. The attachment is awesome. Use a strop with green or white compound in between sharpenings. I do this and it works well for kitchen knives
 
tommytman said:
Get the ken onion with the blade grinder attachment. The attachment is awesome. Use a strop with green or white compound in between sharpenings. I do this and it works well for kitchen knives
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Agree 100%. It's not cheap, but in my opinion it's the fastest and best way to maintain knives. Not bad for sharpening, too, but I don't use it for that. I like Tormek PA-70 paste or Autosol on leather for kitchen knives.
 
Any form of sharpening takes time !
Now , the first time you sharpen a knife if using a Guided System or some sort of Machine Sharpening ( wet stone grinder perhaps ) ..
You may need to invest time to get the edge right ..

But once the edge has been done .. Refreshing the edge should be quick ..
I dont think I take more than 5 minutes to refresh a edge .. And I sharpened 5 SAK's last night ( Guided ) while watching Utube ..
5 around 30 minutes or so Give or Take 5 minutes ..
?????????????????? I guess it just depends ?

If your relatively new to sharpening or to a new method , it's going to take time to get into the swing so to speak ..
I have been using this one guided system for ................. I got it at the start of C19 ... So I have a bit of sharpening under the belt now ..
And .................... Yeah , 5 minutes !
 
I love old carbon steel kitchen knives. The key to them, as has been alluded to, is maintenance. I take the time to get them sharp and use a knife steel on them after each use. When I am done I dry them off, 2-3 quick passes on the steel, and put them away. They stay sharp for quite a while before I need to go to the stones again.

This also works well with a tougher, fine grained stainless like 12c27. I'm guessing that something like Victorinox steel would respond to steeling as well. Someone with more knowledge of stainless might chime in and tell you that. Obsessed With Edges?

I would guess that with a harder and more brittle steel, the same could be done with a ceramic hone.
For carbon, a few passes on a quality steel takes literally seconds.
 
davek14 said:
I love old carbon steel kitchen knives. The key to them, as has been alluded to, is maintenance. I take the time to get them sharp and use a knife steel on them after each use. When I am done I dry them off, 2-3 quick passes on the steel, and put them away. They stay sharp for quite a while before I need to go to the stones again.

This also works well with a tougher, fine grained stainless like 12c27. I'm guessing that something like Victorinox steel would respond to steeling as well. Someone with more knowledge of stainless might chime in and tell you that. Obsessed With Edges?

I would guess that with a harder and more brittle steel, the same could be done with a ceramic hone.
For carbon, a few passes on a quality steel takes literally seconds.
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Yes. Most fine-grained stainless like Victorinox's, Opinel, Case, Buck, etc will usually respond well to light steeling, up to a point. All of them around 0.5% carbon (give or take) and enough chromium (12-14% or more) to make them fully stain-resistant in kitchen use. And all of them in the mid-to-high 50s HRC, which leaves them ductile & tough enough to periodically realign the edge on a steel, and maybe even enhance sharpness with a little bit of burnishing as well, thinning the edge. And I've sometimes perceived that they seem to work-harden the edge a bit as well, seemingly strengthening the edge a little bit and improving its stability in use. But again, that's only up to a point.

When I've used a steel as above for kitchen knives, they can be maintained for several weeks of fairly light & non-abusive use in the kitchen. I've noticed, at some point though, the thin edge will start to behave erratically, moving around quite a bit from cut to cut. It gets weakened & embrittled by the work-hardening effect of the repeated realigning over time (at least, that's my interpretation of what happens). The net effect is, you'll see it cut well on one pass, then it'll slip or otherwise fail on the next, sometimes going back & forth like that as the unstable edge moves around from side to side. That's the cue to take the edge back to a stone and scrub off the weakened steel and reset the edge. I like using a Fine India stone for that, on steels like these.

( Edited to add: )
Full disclosure - These days, I'm usually more inclined to use a ceramic hone for quickly touching up the kitchen knives I use. So, I'm not doing as much steeling as I once was. In terms of metal removal, I think it's basically a wash between the two methods. Either I wait for the steeled edge to become unstable and therefore do more heavy resetting of the edge on a stone, or I just give the edges maybe 3-5 light passes on the ceramic, maybe once a week. I tend to favor the somewhat more 'bitey' edge coming off the ceramic, as opposed to a steeled edge which becomes somewhat more burnished or polished with repeated steeling.
 
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Are you talking cutting bamboo perpendicular to the grain or parallel with the grain? If you're talking cutting bamboo with the grain it is not going to dull your knife unless you're leaning on it as hard as you can.
 
drail said:
Are you talking cutting bamboo perpendicular to the grain or parallel with the grain? If you're talking cutting bamboo with the grain it is not going to dull your knife unless you're leaning on it as hard as you can and in that case that board doesn't really matter. Pastic boards are not hard on knives - but after some use they cannot be cleaned because of all the fuzz and burrs the knife made in it - that stuff will not come out in a dishwasher and it holds food tenaciously. Same goes for rubber. If you are going to use materiels that hold food particles then you MUST sterilize them with steam or or risk food poisoning.
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I’ve used a sharpmaker for the past 10 years or so, setting the bevel at 15 degrees and then putting on the 20 degree micro bevel which I then touch up as and when. Only takes a minute or so to get back to hair popping sharp and the edge lasts a reasonable amount of time depending on how much use is thrown its way. Really easy to master and delivers fast and consistent results. The CBN stones are great for re-profiling when needed.
However I have just bought some fantastic custom knives with incredible grinds and am going to play with the Shapton glass stones in order to keep the geometry nice and acute. Was also looking at the Spyderco Galley bit realistically I’ve got nowhere convenient to mount it.
 
Alberta Ed said:
Freehand on a relatively coarse grit, like 320.
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That's it. Add a few passes on a strop to remove the burr and you are good to go in a few minutes.

oscyp said:
Of course my whetstone skills are horrible.
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Practice makes master.
Most of us here were born with the ability and knowledge how to sharpen knives. A few members who had not had to learn how to sharpen. Looks like you're one of them.

Or....
you could buy QuickSharp paste. Put thin layer on the edge (on both sides) and in 2 or 3 minutes you knife will be sharp as a razor. Wipe the paste of the edge and don't cut yourself.
 
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You can take 1 of 2 approaches. You can either wait until your knives go dull and then resharpen them, or you can spend short amounts of time to maintain them regularly.

It's like managing your garbage. You can either throw away the trash as you produce it, or you can let the trash pile up until you're forced to spend the time that it will take to clean it all up at once.

If you want a clean house then you have to take out the trash. If you want sharp knives then you have to sharpen them.
 
Work Sharp recently came out with a rolling sharpener system that looks pretty darned good for kitchen knives. The ceramic disc would also be great for touch ups. There are a couple of reviews on YouTube.
 
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