Diagrams?

The guide in the lansky kit...(the kit that comes with everything you will need to sharpen a knife on 1 of 4 different angled guides)......shows you a picture/diagram of the different knife angles and what they are most commonly used for.

It'll all come to you sometime.......some faster than others, it's all good....
 
Aelius said:
That's exactly what I thought of it. So to make that slice of pie a lower angle, you must cut off part of the back portion, or "shave the spine" of the knife. According to that person I quoted, I should never shave the spine... but that's the only way to lower the angle as far as I know.
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OK,

A) You didn't read what I wrote;

B) are pulling all of our legs and doing a good job at it; or

C) incapable of understanding the simplest of concepts.

I'm sorry, but you should just give up at this point.
 
You dont sharpen a whole knife, you sharpen the edge. Your confusion about grinding the spine down come from thinking people are telling you to grind the whole side of the knife. You only grind the side of the edge (even a razor blade has an edge) read the moderators post closely.
 
Cougar Allen said:
Get out your knife and look at it. You will notice most of the blade is ground at an angle toward the edge.
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What does it mean if something is "ground"?
It's thick at the spine and a little of the blade near the spine is flat but then it angles down and gets thinner as it gets nearer the edge. That is the primary grind. That was ground by the manufacturer and you don't want to change that.
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Okay I understand what a primary grind is now, thanks :)

Then there's the edge grind, at a steeper angle right at the edge. That is where you will grind to sharpen the knife.
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The bolded "grind" is used in a verb form from what I understand. What does it mean to grind something? It can't mean to "sharpen" since you mention sharpen in the latter part of the sentence.

As for the first sentence in the quote, I just noticed now as you mentioned it, I see how it is angled different right at the edge. In the case of my Nighthawk, it has a silvery coloured metal all around the edge grind. But the rest of the knife is black.

Did you even click on the link I posted? This has got to be a joke. Seriously,
Buy a new knife and throw the old one out when it gets dull. I honestly cannot believe this...
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I didn't click on the link, my apologies.

TorzJohnson, I understand that concept now that Cougar has explained that there's not one angle on the blade.

As for the sharpeners linked, I don't understand how's it's different from the Edge Pro. Other than the fact that it's many times cheaper. All I want is a product that can give my knife the angle of my choice and be able to keep that angle every time I sharpen. Will this product do that?

Oh and now that I know what an edge grind and a primary grind are, I can understand the diagrams posted before. Thank you Cougar, for being the only one I could understand :)
 
Aelius said:
I didn't click on the link, my apologies.


As for the sharpeners linked, I don't understand how's it's different from the Edge Pro. Other than the fact that it's many times cheaper. All I want is a product that can give my knife the angle of my choice and be able to keep that angle every time I sharpen. Will this product do that?
Click to expand...

Did you read any of the info on the site?
* THE REDI-EDGE ORIGINAL SHARPENER

* THE SHARPENERS THAT STARTED IT ALL

* FAST, SAFE, SIMPLE AND EASY TO USE

* DESIGNED TO TAKE THE GUESSWORK OUT OF SHARPENING


In this case I think the last 2 in red are the important notes. Baby steps remember :D

Angle of your choice? Sure it will put a pre determined at the factory razor sharp edge on any knife you want. The angle will be the one that makes your knife sharp. (Not dull) It will be the exact same angle everytime.
Start with this one until you figure knife sharpening out. As far as a specific angle for the cutting edge, Why? Sharp is sharp... Do you know what angle you want? Go to the website and read the information.:D Good luck

Just in case...

http://www.clawhorn.com/storefront/d....aspx?deptid=5
Go here and buy one of these KNIFE SHARPENERS any one of these, it is simple and can't possibly be screwed up...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.clawhorn.com/knife-sharpening-procedure.aspx
(if you still have problems here are the instructions for the Knife Sharpener.)
 
Aelius said:
Warning: Noob alert. If ignorant people make you want to scream, avoid this thread please.....

....If you got this far without hitting the back button while saying "Christ, what an idiot", then thank you. :)
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Looks like a lot of people ignored this part!:rolleyes:

Glad Cougar was able to clarify. You're right, in a focused forum like this it's tough for the uninitiated to understand what "everyone else" thinks is instinct!

As far as sharpeners, the Lansky system and Edge Pro will both provide you with very reproducable angles. When you sharpen, you don't really "grind" the edge (from a vernacular standpoint), you just take a little bit off the sides to get that bite back.

The key, as Cougar explained so clearly, is that you are only removing metal from a narrow part of the cutting edge. You don't take metal off of the whole blade, spine to edge. The comments about marking the edge with black ink refers to that narrow (1/16" - 1/8") angle along the edge, not the whole blade. This is a good strategy for setting up a guided sharpening system like the Edge Pro and is also a GREAT way to help train your hands when sharpening freehand.

Hope you've been helped!

J-
 
HomeBru said:
Looks like a lot of people ignored this part!:rolleyes:
Hope you've been helped!J-
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I didnt ignore this part- If ignorant people make you want to scream, avoid this thread please.....


------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got this far WITHOUT saying what an idiot. :D
....If you got this far without hitting the back button while saying "Christ, what an idiot", then thank you.
 
As a few general comments, english is not everyone's first language and if you have excellent conversational skills in a language you can easily have no understanding of technical terms. Second not everyone has studied geometry and it doesn't make them an idiot. Third, a lot of the terms used on Bladeforums were pretty much invented here and are not actually well known in general or are used in different manners elsewhere.

Aelius, to make a knife you take a piece of steel and turn it into a triangle. One angle will be very small, say 10 degrees and the other two angles will be identical and thus very large, 85 degrees in this case. The ten degree angle is what forms the edge on the knife.

When people speak about knife bevels they usually refer to the angles as if you took that triangle and split it right up the middle and made two right triangles. So now you have two triangles with angles of 90,85 and 5 degrees.

This is a perfect knife which is even on both sides. In reality most knives are uneven so the triangle will be 90,85, 5 on one side but, 90,80,10 on the other. Thus one side (or bevel) of the knife is at 10 degrees and the other at five. Note you ignore the other degrees in the triangle as they don't matter, you really only care about the acute one because that is what cuts.

Now for most knives a design of this shape doesn't work well because the critical angle (the small one) is too acute so it is sharpened at a greater angle, 20 degrees is common. This basically puts another two triangles at the top of the existing one.

Do you follow that so far?

-Cliff
 
From left to right :



-Piece of bar stock
-grind against a stone (pink rectangle) to remove metal and form a wedge
-increase the angle between the blade and the stone
-repeat for other side and you are done
-some line segments to create the triangles to illustrate the angles

The blowup on the bottom shows the final edge highly magnified and shows how there are basically two angles for most blades. One, the primary angle which is the main shape of the blade, and two the secondary or edge angle which is what you sharpen.

Now on most knives the angles are not even from one side to the other and thus the triangles will not be identical.

-Cliff
 
The Edge Pro, or the other smaller one linked previously, is that the only way to ensure that the angle on my knife is even on both sides? My hands don't have that much percision, I couldn't do that with a sharpening stone.
 
OK. Below is a diagram that may help (click on the picture to enlarge it).

It came from this illustrated webpage that may help further:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=26036


When I want to find pictures or diagrams on the internet I go to www.google.com and right above the search box is the highlighted word "images". I click on images. This takes me to a new search page. Whenever I enter words to search for in the text field it will find .jpg or similar picture files. To find the website that I reference above and the picture that I posted I entered the search words: sharpening bevels then I just poked around through the results.
 

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One of the big issues to understand is that most of us here base our descriptions on rather thick-bladed knives contoured like a heavy hunting knife. The typical contour is called a saber grind. From the back of the blade the sides run out at 90-degrees and run flat and parallel to each other. For the half of the blade closest to this "spine" the thickness of the blade is constant, there is no bevel. The primary bevel starts at about the middle of the blade. At this point the sides are angled down from the flat sides by some amount. This might be about 8 degrees on a thick blade. Except on some scandinavian knives you usually don't lay this 8-degree bevel on a sharpening surface and try and grind the bevel all the way to a sharp edge. Somewhere near the edge you put on a steeper sharpening bevel. This will be narrow and might be at 10-degrees for a razor edge or 15-degrees for general purpose edge or 20-degrees for a lazy factory edge. These are honing angle that you put on each side of the edge. The included angle between your two honing bevels is the sum of both sides (say 15 + 15 = 30) some sharpeners are calibrated by the included angle.

Strangely enough you may want to hone a secondary sharpening bevel on the edge of your sharpening bevel. This is largely to cope with the flexibility of the edge that moves away from your honing efforts. So if I hone my edge at 10-degrees per side I may also do a few light honing strokes at 15 degrees per side to clean up the apex of the edge. This might be called a secondary edge angle. (The terminology is not highly standard when you have so many different angles ground on the blade). Some people blend the bevels in a curved manner often called a convex grind.

For razor edges sometimes the blade has a concave primary bevel called a hollow grind. Here is a web page with a lot of lore and pictures from that perspective:
http://www.jayfisher.com/Blades.htm
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Second not everyone has studied geometry and it doesn't make them an idiot.
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LOL, I was a D minus student in math throughout high school. When it comes to algebra, geometry etc., I AM an idiot. Luckily, by simply looking at a protractor I was able to grasp the concept of "angles". :D
 
TorzJohnson said:
Luckily, by simply looking at a protractor I was able to grasp the concept of "angles".
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Not making any implications but just stating some information, I taught on the side while in university as do many as the pay is much higher than typical marking/demonstrating. Often the people you see have learning issues of one sort or another because they have failed to respond to the regular academic system. One individual for example had a pretty severe problem with geometry because if you asked him to draw a square he could, but then if you showed a square to him (even one he drew) he was unable to realize it was a square. Unfortunately people like this tend to get branded as idiots because they can't do even obvious tasks.

Aelius said:
My hands don't have that much percision, I couldn't do that with a sharpening stone.
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Unless you have a physical disability of some kind then it really isn't a significant factor. If the angles are more even then the knife will look better to most as people in general tend to like symmetrical objects, but any normal person can easily hold an angle so stable so as to sharpen a knife. When you start off it will take you a bit longer because you will waste a lot of passes on the stone which go too low and just round the shoulder back or go way to high and set a burr sharply. Proper use of micro-beveling will solve this problem to a great extent as well. Micro-beveling means you just add basically another triangle. Note in the above there is the primary and secondary angle, well you just add a third, the micro-bevel or final angle. Most of this, and especially the uses are much easier to understand in person. I could demonstrate this to you in minutes and you would be amazed why anyone would think it was difficult.

-Cliff
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Unless you have a physical disability of some kind then it really isn't a significant factor. If the angles are more even then the knife will look better to most as people in general tend to like symmetrical objects, but any normal person can easily hold an angle so stable so as to sharpen a knife. When you start off it will take you a bit longer because you will waste a lot of passes on the stone which go too low and just round the shoulder back or go way to high and set a burr sharply. Proper use of micro-beveling will solve this problem to a great extent as well. Micro-beveling means you just add basically another triangle. Note in the above there is the primary and secondary angle, well you just add a third, the micro-bevel or final angle. Most of this, and especially the uses are much easier to understand in person. I could demonstrate this to you in minutes and you would be amazed why anyone would think it was difficult.

-Cliff
Click to expand...

I can hold an angle perfectly fine, the trouble is getting that angle. I can't just look at the knife and the stone and say "That's a 12 degree angle" and then adjust it accordingly to get a 15 degree angle, I'm not that percise. But regardless, will the "mini Edge Pro" for lack of better term, ensure that I get the same angle on my knife every time?
 
The point that Cliff is trying to make is that there is no "magic angle" and there is no "magic symmetry". Ordinary mortals have been making adequate edges for millenia without sharpening fixtures or systems.

There are only a couple important steps to take and there is nothing precise about them.
(1) Do your major honing at a low angle (between say 7 and 15 degrees)
If your major honing is at a low enough angle it will not matter what the angle is, whether the two sides match, or even that your honed surfaces are flat or curved. You just want the slope behind your edge to be small and the thickness behind the edge to be minimal. Using a little math you want to tilt the blade so that the middle of the spine is about 1/5 of the blade width above your hone surface. For a 1-inch-wide blade that would be 1/5 of an inch or .2 inch. For most purposes anything under 1/4 blade width would be OK. It is easiest to do this honing with a somewhat coarse hone. You can use any honing stroke direction that is easy for you. You need to do this step until the bevels that you are creating meet at the apex of the edge on both sides of the blade. This is where the black permanent marker can help. You basically paint the area that you are honing black and hone until the metal right next to the apex of the edge is not black anymore. The knife should cut pretty well and feel sharp at the end of this step.

(2) After (1) add a micro bevel at a slightly higher angle. Use light pressure, a fine grit, and edge-forwards strokes (with the edge running first across the hone like you are shaving the hone), and alternate left-right-left-right sides of the blade as you stroke. At this step you want to work both sides of the edge somewhat equally. This angle also does not need to be precise, just make it a little bit more tilted than step (1). If you work lightly this will not thicken your edge cross-section much and the finished angle at the edge will be lower than you expect. The edge will flex slightly and your finished edge will be hard to distinguish from your angle from step (1). This micro bevel with a finer hone at a higher angle will remove weak edge material from step (1) called a burr and will give you a smooth and acute finished edge. There is no precise count for how many strokes to do at this step, but use an extremely light touch and do somewhere between 5 an 15 strokes per side (alternating left and right sides).
 
Aelius said:
I can hold an angle perfectly fine, the trouble is getting that angle. I can't just look at the knife and the stone and say "That's a 12 degree angle" and then adjust it accordingly to get a 15 degree angle, I'm not that percise. But regardless, will the "mini Edge Pro" for lack of better term, ensure that I get the same angle on my knife every time?
Click to expand...


In my opinion yes! It just has the 2 carbide blades that are mounted to the knife sharpener, they cannot, and dont move. all you have to do is follow their simple instructions.

I have other knife sharpeners that are more difficult to use etc...
But the Klawhorn knife sharpeners (Redi edge, tactical pro) are about the simplest and fastest knife sharpeners I have used to date. There is no need to worry about angles and everything else, and it gets the knife sharp!!
Good luck!
 
wh4f said:
In my opinion yes! It just has the 2 carbide blades that are mounted to the knife sharpener, they cannot, and dont move. all you have to do is follow their simple instructions.

I have other knife sharpeners that are more difficult to use etc...
But the Klawhorn knife sharpeners (edge pro, tactical pro) are about the simplest and fastest knife sharpeners I have used to date. There is no need to worry about angles and everything else, and it gets the knife sharp!!
Good luck!
Click to expand...

OK, another noob question here:
I checked out the Klawhorn Redi-Edge Pro and Pocket Pro.
Somewhere, years ago, I "learned" that this style of sharpener, that "shaves" a bit of the edge off, was deprecated, and treated as a lazy housewife's tool for putting a crappy edge on a carving knife, but not a "real" sharpening system.
They are certainly easy to use! Are they considered useful for a good (not even for a "fine") knife? Do they cut away too much metal, if used frequently? Are these or other similar models adjustable, to set the bevel angle?

Thanks! Dave
 
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