Edge imperfections after sharpening

[fockewul]

I recently sharpened a few cheap kitchen knives with my sharpmaker. I first rebeveled them with the diamond rods to get the nicks out. Using my 10 X loupe I noticed that even though the nicks were gone, there were still some very small imperfections left. It was like some “micro nicks”, only visible with a 10 X loupe and even then small, but they were there. I did a few more passes on the diamond rods and some were gone while new ones appeared.

I thought it may be due to the roughness of the edge, so I proceed to the brown rods. Still no luck, same thing happened. At this point it became clear that the fine rods wouldn’t solve the problem, but I moved on to these in order to finish sharpening the knives (my wife was complaining already that I was taking too long to sharp them).

By the way, this happened in all of the knives. I was using the 40 degree angle of the sharpmaker. I got the knives sharp enough to shave my arm’s hair but those edge imperfections are still bothering me. Can it be the quality of the metal? Is there something that I’m missing here?

Thanks

 

[bgentry]

If I'm reading you right, you had chips in the edge: Small missing pieces. Then you sharpened with diamond and are left with smaller missing pieces.

If that's right, you simply didn't remove enough metal to get rid of the entire chip/nick. Unfortunately, you have to remove enough metal from the edge to meet the deepest chip you have. I'd try using the smallest blade you have, and work on the diamond rods until you have no nicks or chips at all, then move on to the medium and fine. That should take care of it unless I'm misunderstanding you.

Brian.

 

[Dog of War]

Hard to say, maybe you're using too much pressure. Or maybe these knives have damage, or roughness from using the diamond rods, that you just haven't gotten completely sharpened out -- Sharpmaker is pretty slow going with the ceramics. I've examined quite a few edges under a microscope at over 100x, and with most steels you can get an edge that looks pretty much perfect even at that level of magnification.

 

[Jason B.]

It could be that you did not remove the damaged steel on the edge. When a edge especially when its cheap steel, has a lot of damage usually needs to be completely re-ground to assure that any and all damaged steel has been removed.