Sharpener dulling my knife?

[Django606]

I bought this $20 Gatco Carbide sharpener

https://secure.buffnet.net/gatcosharpeners/

(just go to carbide)

I use it for edges that I don't want to potentially mess up on a stone (brand new knives)

So I went to use it a couple times on my Chinook, and then I stropped it. I couldn't shave as easily as when I first got it, but I didn't test how well it shaved before I sharpened it, either. I don't know if this actually made it duller..is this even possible?

What is the difference between this $20 sharpener and a stone? (Besides the obvious..)

And I plan on getting a Sharpmaker very soon..

Thanks.

 

[fulloflead]

Ew! Those kind of pull-through sharpeners are poo-poo.

I don't even know what they'd be good for except making a really, really dull knife with a really soft steel a little less dull. I'm sorry you wasted your money on that. :thumbdn:

Can you return it? Get the Sharpmaker and the video that comes with it.
Don't forget that you can stuff a magazine or something under one end of the Sharpmaker base to tilt it this way or that if the angle isn't right.

.

 

[yoda4561]

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=290439&highlight=carbide

Please don't use Carbide sharpeners on good quality cutlery. They're kinda handy for field sharpening machetes, and other soft carbon steels, but for high end cutlery they're garbage.

 

[Zwaplat]

Throw it away, quick!

Edit: and get that Sharpmaker as soon as you can.

 

[Ryan8]

I don't know if this actually made it duller..is this even possible?

Yes, and quite likely. Spyderco puts good edges on their knives and I can almost guarantee that this product will never achieve anything like the factory edge. I've never used any sharpener like this that I like.

In fact if you take your knife with the factory edge to this kind of sharpener, you're just going to make it duller.

Don't use it any more. You'll save yourself some work fixing the edge once you get the Sharpmaker.

 

[Jeff Clark]

You asked "What is the difference between this $20 sharpener and a stone?" One way to explain the difference is by analogy. When you sharpen a knife edge you are in essence trying to polish the side bevels adjacent to the edge so that they smoothly and finely meet at a sharp apex along the edge. Think of how you would do this sort of thing on wooden furniture. You would take nice flat blocks and cover them with sandpaper. You would work from coarse sandpaper blocks down to ultrafine sandpaper blocks. As a final step you might use some 0000 steel wool on the surface. This process is analogous to using a series of progressively finer honing stones on an edge and following up with a strop or a smooth-surfaced steel. In contrast when you use the $20.00 carbide "sharpener" you are just scraping a steel block across the surface of your furniture and scraping off wood with the edges of the block. At best it will knock off some high points on the wood surface and do a little smoothing, but at the expense of some rippling and chattering gouges in the surface. It is a little like trying to do your final finish on the furniture using a wood plane. It can leave a smooth surface along the path of a single stroke of the plane, but you get discontinuities where the strokes come together. Since the scraper/sharpener doesn't have the wide flat base and the sharp knife edge of a plane the scraper doesn't provide the stability of a plane. Each stroke rips off material with a very irregular control of the depth of material removed and its smoothness. It is a lousy thing to do to a precise surface.

All that being said if you are out in the jungle with a cheap survival knife or machete it is better than nothing. It is the kind of thing a lonely widow might find useful for her 98 cent kitchen knives. I wouldn't use it on a good knife, particularly not one made from a good hard steel alloy.