People often joke about sharpening a knife down to nothing... has anyone done that?

T

TheMightyGoat

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People joke about it a lot, but has anyone ever sharpened a knife until so much metal was removed that the knife was no longer usable? And I mean only if you were caring for it properly... if you tried to sharpen a scalpel on an electric bench grinder, it doesn't count. :rolleyes: :D
 
I have significantly reduced the blade width of my Adventurer model SAK over the last 10 years, but it is still very usable. During that interval I have not tried to be really delicate. I commonly use an extra-fine diamond hone to set my edge bevels then finish with a ceramic hone. I also strop and steel on occasions. If I'm in a hurry and it is really dull I might hit it briefly with 220 grit on my belt sander. I would guess that this blade would have a useful life of about 20 years treated in this manner.

I pick up a lot of used kitchen knives at thrift stores. While going through the stock I sometimes see knives that have been grossly over-sharpened. I probably see 500 knives that have never been sharpened for every one knife I see that has been over-sharpened. Usually over sharpening happens when someone has a grinding wheel of some sort to work with. It used to be common to have a knife sharpener attached to electric can openers. A lot of people whittled their blades way down using those. Most knives I see that have been over sharpened have been hit with that type of sharpener or else a regular bench grinder. In the last 40 years I've seen maybe one or two knives really demolished by purely hand methods. The likeliest exceptions to this are knives used by meat packers or butchers that are sharpened several times per week.
 
I have seen it. I work in a Meat Department and we have a grinder for sharpening knives. The head butcher sharpens his knives on it nearly everyday (the idiot needs to learn to use a stone) and after several years of doing this some of our knives look really funny. One knife that was originally about an inch or so thick, looks like a fillet knife now :D
 
Mike at the store carries a Benchmade that looks more like a Banana than a spearpoint blade anymore but it's still useable. I've seem sp,e pf my grandads old knives that looked like toothpicks from all the years of sharpening.
 
My dad worked in a cotton mill, and always wanted a fresh wire edge on his knives for cutting thread, yarn, etc. He went through knives like crazy.
 
Well I did make a toothpick, but it wasn't technically a knife. It was the knife blade on a Coleman brand POS multi-tool. I thought since they didn't even bother to grind it (just like rounded a slab of metal with a point) I would do some really aggressive sharpening on my new diamond stone.
 
Does this count?

attachment.php


Just kidding.
 
Originally posted by T. Erdelyi
Does this count?

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/attachment.php?s=&postid=1937015[IMG]

Just kidding. [/B][/QUOTE]

Lol. Did you edit that picture?
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Any knife that is continually sharpened will of course end up ground to nothing. Locally our chicken boners use 5" semi-flex boners. The average life of a knife is 6 weeks. As far as they are concerned it is part and parcel of the job. Try and tell them they would be better off with a custom job that will last and they will laugh at you. In discussions with these blokes we are striving for the perfect chicken boner but we are yet to reach consensus. I have seen 6" ham boners reduced to 3" kitchen parers in the days of carbon steel.

For those interested my day job is sharpening blades. I use a 2x36" slack belt from a worn 100grit up to 600grit before I finish is on a stone or smooth steel. One way of making a blade last longer is to double or triple bevel it. Try and keep the one single bevel and you will eat the blade.
 
My grandfather used to sharpen them down to pretty close to nothing, and he did it without a power grinder. He used carbon steel slip-joints and sharpened them to a very acute edge on a coarse silicon carbide bench stone, frequently, and he never took any care not to damage the edge. He would do all kinds of things with his pocketknife, and he had a bad habit of sticking it into the turf to clean the blade. He taught me to do that when I was about four or five, and I soon noticed the edge often got nicked on a pebble and quit doing it. I told him about that, but he went right on doing it. I think he liked sharpening knives. Those old 1095 slipjoints were cheap enough. He'd sharpen one down to a sliver and eventually it would break when he was prying at something with it and he'd buy another one. :)

I have that bench stone now, and I have a three-bladed knife of his. The long blade isn't sharpened away too much but he always favored the short blades -- both of them on this knife are pretty well gone. I guess one of them has about one third of its original width left, and the other has less than that and it's so short I think he broke it off and ground the remainder to a point -- by hand, I bet; he had some power tools but he liked working with hand tools (me too). Most of the nail nick is gone on that one, but I can still get enough nail in it to open it.

Most of his knives had only two blades, a clip and a pen. I'm not sure what shape the third blade on this one was before it got broken off and reground.

If he were still around and still using it, this knife wouldn't have much life expectancy.
 
Yes, my great-grandfather's knife.

I remember it fairly well, having a large stag handle, and a blade the equivelent of a toothpick. He kept it sharp tho. I guess the old-timer felt that if it still worked, why the hell be wastefull buying a new one lol. I'd have to imagine that knife spent decades in that man's pocket, i believe it was given to my uncle when great grandad passed many years ago. It's definitely a testament to a hard working man's life.


Haha, much like Cougar's grandfather,
My grandad also reground broken points apparently, because the large stag handle seemed about three times bigger than necessary for the toothpick sized blade :)
 
editing this because I was reading the forums and noticed I'd posted in this thread...but I never posted here! Weird. Maybe I better change my password to be safe. Now that I've somehow mysteriously auto-posted I suppose I might as well answer the question and say that no, I have never sharpened a knife down to nothing. Now I'm going to go ponder how this post happened.
 
I have a crafstmen stock knife that I sharpened the belly out of the clip blade and signicantly narrowed the sheepsfoot blade. It was my first pocket knife, and I learned to whittle and sharpen with it (self taught, it had a rough life :) )
I also have a spyderco delica that I used as an EDC for a couple years, at the same time goofing around seeing just how sharp I could get it. The combination of the extremely acute edge I put on it and the hard use, led me to sharpening away enough of the bevel that it wouldn't cut nearly as well anymore. I flat ground it, completely removing the narrow hollow grind, and made a new handle. Its a heck of a slicer but I don't carry it anymore, edge is so thin it won't stay sharp for the kind of stuff I need it to.
 
I have an old SAK I destroyed while regaining my freehand sharpening skills. The blade is now about 3/8" deep. It's almost a sheepsfoot :o It's finally sharp though ;) It was worth it to get good at freehand sharpening.

I've also removed a lot of material from my Wave over the years. I think I typically sharpened it at too acute of an angle when I did it freehand. As a result, it got dull faster and needed sharpening again sooner. Now the edge is even with the bottom of the "tang" at the heel of the blade. Now I sharpen it to a 40* utility edge using my Sharpmaker.

I'm a big believer in the Sharpmaker now. While I can now consistently get a good edge freehand, I think I can get my knives sharper faster with the Sharpmaker while removing less material.
 
seen it done many a time..............primarily by people with coarse diamond hones who use their knives regularly.
 
Originally posted by Cougar Allen
My grandfather used to sharpen them down to pretty close to nothing, and he did it without a power grinder.
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Yours too, eh? My grandfather has a kitchen full of butchers, boning, paring, etc knives that are all sharped to filet knives. Hell, I thought that was normal until a few years ago :).

He also sharpens his pocketknives like this unless he breaks the blade prying with it or loses the knife completely. It wouldn't do to give him a fancy custom. :rolleyes:

BTW, he also makes a few utility blades from time to time. As a family, we like to make BBQ (roast the hog, chop it up, etc). Most knives are too weak or light to easily chop a hog into bbq. He makes chopping knives out of old bush ax blades and uses 1.25" wood poles to make the handles (cut them in half and use machine bolts to hold the "handle" slabs to the tang). The knives are ugly, course, and funky. However, they are like mini axes and very durable. They're so crude, they're almost elegant. :)

He recently gave me one for my B-Day. It's not a Henkels, but it has a certain "seriousness" about it. :D

Chris
 
Originally posted by mtnbkr

BTW, he also makes a few utility blades from time to time. As a family, we like to make BBQ (roast the hog, chop it up, etc). Most knives are too weak or light to easily chop a hog into bbq. He makes chopping knives out of old bush ax blades and uses 1.25" wood poles to make the handles (cut them in half and use machine bolts to hold the "handle" slabs to the tang). The knives are ugly, course, and funky. However, they are like mini axes and very durable. They're so crude, they're almost elegant. :)
He recently gave me one for my B-Day. It's not a Henkels, but it has a certain "seriousness" about it. :D
Chris
Click to expand...

Pics Please!
 
I have a small collection of pocketknives my dad owned that are pretty bowed. After my parents died I kept finding things, like worn out pocketknives in boxes, in drawers, on bookcases, and displayed them in my bookcase with other everyday relics from the golden age. I didn't think too much of it till now, all those little worn out knives look pretty cool. My dad used sandpaper and his leg to sharpen his. I thought it was goofy at the time but now I sharpen my swamprats that way. I think he did it just for the fun cause he always had a sharp knife, yet he was always sharpening his knife.
 
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