Serrations mutated by sharpening?

Jeff Clark

Jeff Clark

Joined
Apr 27, 1999
Messages
6,117
As I've frequently stated, I learned to hate serrations as a semi-pro door-to-door knife sharpener. I realized today that I never mentioned that it was not simply the added hastle that made me dislike sharpening serrations. I didn't like the results.

Since I anticipated a lot of serration sharpening work I had purchased several wedge and cylindrical stones before I started. I also purchased some cylindrical and conical grinding bits to fit my electric drill. Lightly dulled knives were no real problem, I could use the optimally sized rod to touch up the edge. The problem was that only about 5% of the serrated knives I encountered were lightly dulled. Most of them required considerable material removal. It took an irritatingly long amount of time to remove the material. What distressed my professional sensabilities more was that the serrations would be conspicously less uniform than when they came from the factory. The more times you sharpened the knife the more irregular the serrations became.

What are the experiences of long time serrated edge users on the forums? Are you only performing minor edge touch ups on your blades? Have you noted and been distressed by mutation of your factory edge into a home made edge over years of resharpening? Do you send your knives back to the factory periodically to get your serrations back to machine specs? Are Spyderco sharpeners so good that they prevent serration mutation?


[This message has been edited by Jeff Clark (edited 08-27-2000).]
 
Hello,

Just another Plus of not having serrations on a blade. FUnny how they cut well but after the initial dulling they never tend to work as well after being resharpened. Thats why i hate serrated BLades and think there more of a hindrance than a plus. Nothing beats a good straight edge for ease of maintainance.

Allen

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Allen Blade
Spokane,WA USA

" You can make great knives and sell a few, Or make Great AFFORDABLE knives and sell many"
WEB SITE : http://hometown.aol.com/bladecutlery/index.html
 
Serrations... ewwww. The best results I've gotten were from making my own thing that fit the serration groove, and then putting sandpaper over it and filing down the groove with it. Make a similar instrument, and use with white rouge, then red rouge. Might get good results. Cheap too. For a while I gave up on having them looking right, and just ran the inside of the serrations on an extension of the back of a ceramic bowl.
 
I guess it all depends on how nice you want the knife to look when your done with it. I really like a combo edge blade for my daily needs. Actually I consider it a must. I have a fully serrated blade and a fully plain blade on my gerber multi lock which gets used for abusive cutting or things that require a small blade. Then to accompany that I carry a one hand opening folder for the quick jobs and it actually gets used for a lot of heavy cutting also. The main reason it has to be combo edge is because I work around horses and have to cut a good deal of rope and twine. And since theres always the chance of me getting tangled up in one end of a rope, with the other end tied to a running/jumping/kicking/rolling horse- I want to be able to cut a rope with one pass and do it in a hurry.
But I will agree that the maintnance on a serrated blade is somewhat of a pain. Especially if you want them to look the way they did when they were new, after you sharpen them. Any more I just go for sharp and don't worry much about looks. In the end, they'll have to be filed out pretty close to the original form or they won't work right. And they don't need sharpened nearly as often as the plain section of the blade. In my case, its worth it to put up with serrations. If all I did was open letters and use the knife for light utility it would be a totally different story.

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It'll feel better when it stops hurting.
 
All serrations are NOT created equal. Neither were all systems of sharpening. I`ve found that the serrations I get from Spyderco cut well and are easy to maintain with the Sharpmaker. However, serrations from companies like Cold Steel, CRKT and others have the problems you describe. I like serrations if they are done right. Spyderco is one company that does them right.
 
Allen :

they cut well but after the initial dulling they never tend to work as well after being resharpened.
Click to expand...

This is only true if you are unable to sharpen them correctly. You could say the same thing about any edge.

Jeff :

Have you noted and been distressed by
mutation of your factory edge into a home made edge over years of resharpening?
Click to expand...


This is only likely if large amounts of metal are being worn away and as you note it forces you to actually grind a new serration pattern. I would guess on a knife this cheap looks are far from important and you have long since got your $20 worth as even with the "soft" ~50 RC stainless blades they will take a good deal of use to actual wear the serrations away.

On the high end serrated blades like those from Benchmade and Spyderco with the very wear resistant steels I would be curious to see just how much cutting it took to remove the serration pattern. Of course a plain edge knife under similar work would no longer look like the original either and the edge would be far from 100% because of the thickening from repeated sharpenings. Both would require a significant amount of metal removal before the performance approached 100% again.

I am not actually sure which one would wear out the fastest. It would depend on the kind of performance you want to have. If you are constantly sharpening both to keep the performance at near optimal then the serration pattern would obviously wear quicker. However serrations can rip/tear a lot of materials when a similarly blunted plain edge blade just glides over them. If you were willing to settle for this performance you could very well have the serrated blade outlast the plain edge one which would have to be sharpened much more often.

-Cliff
 
I have a serrated Spyderco Endura that has been my work knife for about ten years. I sharpen it on a Spyderco 203. I've never been able to restore it to the original scary sharp factory edge, but I can definitely return it to usably sharp with little effort.

Jack
 
Cliff, I'm not talking about grinding new serrations into a blade. I'm talking about fixing edges that have significant tooth tip wear, but still have intact serration valleys that I can use to center my sharpening effort. If I try to restore the original contour I need to match the serration radius and cut into the blade sufficiently to restore the tip. This requires removing more material than would be required to remove the damaged area on a straight blade. If I use a rotating tool to do the job it will often drift a little off center as I work. Doing it by hand is a lot of work and doesn't look as neat when I'm done. If I'm in a hurry I cheat and use a wider diameter hone and work on the tips more than the valleys of the serrations. This works at first, but rapidly the serrations get shallower.

The only solution that looks nice to me is to have a perfectly matched diamond impregnated rod. Used like a file it will do a quick job of working the full serration notch from peak to valley. I seldom have this perfect tool so my serrations start to look ragged with time. The situation is worse if the teeth get bent or chipped off.
 
A bread knife in the kitchen, another in the garage, and a couple of paring knives are the only serrated edges that I deal with. Oh, forgot about my son's SAK. I notice that the tips of the serrations seem to get the most wear and thus take the most time to sharpen, a process which rounds the tips with my technique. I use a ceramic stick to work the radius of each serration if they're real dull, also paying attention to the tips until light doesn't reflect from the edge. I then lightly hone the other side of the edge almost parallel to the side as all of the serrations that we have are ground on one side. I then use a crock stick to put the final edge on, using kind of a zig-zag pattern back and forth, in an attempt to work the edges of the serrations, and use the crock stick angle for the serrated edge but tilt the knife for the other side. It seems to work fine even though I'm slowly wearing wearing down the tips of the serrations.

A couple of daughters of some friends of my wife sold Cutco during a summer and we let them come by. A sales demo that they do is to have you cut a piece of rope with your bread or other serrated knife, and both were amazed that ours cut so well as evidently so few others do. She then asked us to use our paring knife and I cut the rope in one slice, again amazing them. Our Henckels knives have served us well but they don't hold an edge like my other knives do, which seems to be the case for most kitchen cutlery.
 
One tool that would make serrations easier to deal would be a conical ceramic/aluminum oxide/silicon carbide/diamond rod, or even a set of them. Ideally the taper would pretty gradual and yet one would need to cover a range of radii. One could then hone perpendicular to the edge, minimizing wear on the tips of the serrations.
 
Having had a couple of knives with combo edges in the past, nowadays I almost always buy a plain edge unless I'm replacing my favourite (battered) Spyderco. Tiny serrations are a pain to sharpen if you want to preserve the 'factory-fresh' look since you'll have to be real careful (as in real slow) not to let the ceramic rod bite into the peaks.

In my first few attempts, I tried to keep the job perfect but after awhile I figured function was more important than form. My spyderco has lots of 'bite marks' but I don't worry too much about it. As they say, the first few scratches are the hardest to bear. Besides it seems to add more character...
 
One of the best threads I've seen about sharpening serrations: http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum20/HTML/001461.html . Ken Delavigne's post especially had a lot of good information in it and I thought this passage was very insightful:
With a plain edge you can often restore, or even improve on, the original edge. With serrated edges you're trying to compete with a special wheel that imparts the shape of the serration onto the edge in one movement. Trying to restore this effect using linear motion will almost certainly take away some metal you'd like to leave in place. Accept less-than-perfection even before you begin.
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[This message has been edited by cerulean (edited 08-28-2000).]
 
Jeff, I had the same problem when I was using round diamond files and a wedge file from Lansky. Actually go a complaint from one of the people I sharpened there knife. But now that I have a Sharpmaker 204 I have no troubles with it at ALL. In fact it's even easier to sharpen serrations than plain edge. Using a 204 for serrations takes a little getting used to but it works better than anything I've seen and justifies the buying of serrated knives.
Mykl
 
So what makes the Sharpmaker 204 work so well? I would expect a V-style rod sharpener to be hard to use on individual serrations.
 
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