Kitchen knife help......

Monofletch

Monofletch

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Jan 14, 2010
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I have a Forshner by Victornox #'s are 40013 -- 5.6406.15

I can't seem to get it sharp. Is is some crazy steel, or a piece of crap?
 
Forschners are generally pretty low end. A bunch of guys I work with use them as cheap beater/throwaway/don't care if someone steals them knives.
 
If you have the money for a good one, I would recommend Elliot Williamsons' (Ferrum Forge) kitchen knives. He can make one out of Elmax for you and his knives are always beautiful.
 
I think Vicrotinox has relatively soft steel in their kitchen knives. What are you using to sharpen it?

My current favourite in the kitchen is a Tojiro Shirogami nakiri (carbon steel). It was very cheap, yet takes a sick edge. You'll need water stones to maintain it, though.
 
I was using my Lansky Fold a V. It works on my D2 blades I figure it would sharpen anything.
 
Seems counter-intuitive, but I get better results on cheaper soft steels by using the underside of a mixing bowl and stropping on newspaper wrapped around the edge of my cutting board. A lot of hard abrasives wind up being too aggressive for these soft metals. I've also gotten good results by just using black and white compound (black first, followed by the white) smeared on paper and stropped. Even with a lot of wear, a hard stone isn't needed often with the lower end kitchen cutlery, and they just don't respond well to a lot of attention in my experience.
 
The Victorinox Forschner knives are said to be x500CR MO (1.4110) steel hardened to 55-56 and a carbon content of 0.48-0.60, which I understand to be close to 440A specs. I bought a box load of users years ago from a meat processor to use as practice knives for new sharpening equipment. They are certainly not high end, but the geometry works well for what they are designed for and you would be hard pressed to find something better for the price. I find them easy to sharpen by a wide variety of means including ceramic stones/rods, so I am wondering if it is an angle/apex issue. I think all the Vic boning knives have an original 15 degree per side edge. What angle are you using and have you tried the Sharpie trick?
 
Forshner sharpen very well. You should be able to get them to split hair relatively easily (not that, whittling hair should be the goal for a kitchen knife).
Any medium grit like Bester 1200, chosera 1000, Arashiyama 1000, etc. will put good edge on Forshner.
You can follow it up by some sort of fine grit, maybe SS 5k, and it'll have nice bite + keenness that's good for a kitchen knife.
 
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i have sharpened up all kinds of kitchen knives including forshners and they took a good edge. just keep working at it and maybe put some sharpie on the edge so you can see what you are doing to the edge. heavyhanded gave you some good tips to try and its easy to do.
 
Yes. I finally worked up a burr. It seemed to take longer than it should have, but it's good to go now. I had to dig out my diamond sharpeners and some 2000 grit paper. It looks brand new with a mirror edge--Momma is happy.
Thanks for all the help.
.....and yes, a Sharpie is always seems to help me.
 
Yes, they are low end and have a softer steel. Should be fairly easy to sharpen though, had a customer request hand sharpening on similar blades yesterday, used a 180 grit and 2000 grit waterstone with good results. Because the steel is soft large jumps can be made and its often better to do so.
 
I've settled into the habit of 'stropping' my (no-name stainless) kitchen knives on relatively coarse-grit wet/dry sandpaper; something like 320-400 grit, maybe 600. Because the steel is soft and has minimal abrasion-resistance, results come very quickly at these coarser grits. Use the sandpaper over a firm or hard backing (thin leather, wood, and I usually use glass).

I've previously tried finer grit ceramics and similar means, but those seem to over-polish the edges and they lose their 'bite' very quickly this way. This steel is just too soft to work well at higher polish.

I was recently fiddling around with using a couple of simple emery boards (nail files) to tune up the edge on an 'inexpensive' 70s/80s-vintage Japanese-made stainless paring knife, and it worked great. These are the black/pink emery boards seen in grocery/drug stores, with a 'foam' core about ~1/8" thick. I used a 'black' emery board of pretty coarse grit, in an edge-trailing stroke with the emery board laid flat on a wooden table (double-sided grit of the emery board holds itself in place nicely on a wooden surface, without slipping), and then stropped the edge on the rough side of my leather belt. This left a very nicely-toothy edge on it, which seems to suit this blade perfectly.


David
 
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People often regard steel as if it was made from a single element with a uniform smooth texture. You just rub on it with a fine abrasive and it will take an arbitrarily fine edge. In reality steel is a mixture of elements that do not blend together anything like pure iron. When you get down to the micron scale the steel looks like a lumpy combination of contrasting elements. Some are hard, some are soft, some shear off clean when abraded and some deform a little like copper or lead. I don't like the 440 series of stainless since the high chrome is hard, lumpy and yet doesn't seem to like to abrade crisply when honed at low angles to extremely fine edges. I like low angles on my edges and perhaps that is some of the reason I find 440A objectionable.

The solution for me is generally to use diamond hones on these alloys. Diamond grit is maximally hard and the grains are sharper than most abrasives. Diamond grit is pretty good at putting an arbitrarily fine edge at low honing angle on high chromium stainless. There are other ways to do this, but this is simple and consistent for me. Often I finish with a slightly coarser grit for a good slicing edge.
 
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