sharpening question

R

RICHARD BYARS

Joined
Sep 26, 2016
Messages
33
I have been using a pull through sharpener that I am sure is frowned upon in this site or taking my good knives to someone else to sharpen. I am considering buying a KME sharpener, but want to buy it for the right reason.
Am I damaging my knives by using the pull through sharpener or just not getting them as sharp as they could be?
I thing that I understand how to use the KME sharpener and it seems easy.......Does it take much skill to use the KME sharpener?
Any other reasons to use a KME sharpener???
Thanks
 
From my understanding is that pull sharpeners Considerably lessen the life of your knife.

It wouldn't last the generations.

But if you view the knife as a short-life throw away tool, then it probably doesn't matter much.

something to consider for favorites, antiques, and family heirlooms.
 
Honestly, I would not use the pull through. If it’s easy, fast and cheap it’s not likely very good. Guided systems are fine, as is just buying a diamond plate and free handing. I suspect you’ll notice a difference.
 
Crag the Brewer said:
From my understanding is that pull sharpeners Considerably lessen the life of your knife.

It wouldn't last the generations.

But if you view the knife as a short-life throw away tool, then it probably doesn't matter much.

something to consider for favorites, antiques, and family heirlooms.
Click to expand...
They also tend to tear the edge on the carbide side, and even the ceramic side leaves the scratch pattern parallel to the edge. None of that is desirable.
 
The kind of cheap portable pull through sharpeners that you'll most often find have this major flaw that not a lot of people talk about. Whether they use ceramic or pieces of carbide or whatever, they tend to be staggered such that one side of the V is in front of the other. This makes it so that you can't reach the whole edge on both sides with most knives. There will be a section on one side of your edge at the heel which the pull through sharpener never touches. As you can imagine, repeated use of the pull through sharpener ruins the uniformity of your edge at that section.

Carbide pull through sharpeners can also end up shredding your edge, and the ceramic ones will create a fragile scratch pattern which is parallel to the edge. This weakens the edge. You want the scratch pattern to be at least diagonal or perpendicular to the edge.

Short takeaway is that pull through sharpeners generally don't do a good job and they make more work for you in the long run. The way that you know you're doing a good job sharpening is when you have reduced the amount of sharpening that you need to do overall. With pull through sharpeners you need to use them more and they give you poorer results. With freehand or a sharpening rig, you can do a much better job than the pull through does, and you can go longer without needing to sharpen again. And then the final, best way in my opinion, is if you just touch up your edge a little bit after each time you use the knife, and in this way you will spend a lot less time overall having to sharpen, because there won't be any chance for edge damage to accumulate which would have taken more time to fix when you eventually got around to it.

And this last bit is just my personal thoughts on a slight tangent, but all this potentially goes out the window if you are working professionally with knives in food processing. In that case, using an electric pull through sharpener and a honing steel might actually make a surprising amount of sense...
 
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And yes the KME sharpener is a fine tool, and simple enough to use.
There are a LOT of other options, but sharpening is divided mainly between FREEHAND, which is usually done using stones (water or oil typically) or diamond plates, and GUIDED systems, ranging from the simple to quite complex.
The KME is a guided system. It is not the simplest but far from the most complex.
 
I'll add that the KME will probably struggle with bigger knives (>5 or 6" blade length) but you'll get a much sharper edge from a guided system assuming you are comparing it with the standard carbide style pull through.
 
RICHARD BYARS said:
I have been using a pull through sharpener that I am sure is frowned upon in this site or taking my good knives to someone else to sharpen. I am considering buying a KME sharpener, but want to buy it for the right reason.
Am I damaging my knives by using the pull through sharpener or just not getting them as sharp as they could be?
I thing that I understand how to use the KME sharpener and it seems easy.......Does it take much skill to use the KME sharpener?
Any other reasons to use a KME sharpener???
Thanks
Click to expand...
Yes, you are damaging your knives. You should be able to tell that just by looking at them. But that's esthetic. The edge you are making is awful, a horrible desecration of what "edge" means. But it probably cuts for a while.

A lot depends on the knife. Crappy knife, it works for you, who cares? Sebenza and a carbide pull through, then it's time to take a seat and let the knife equivalent of Chris Hansen explain where you went wrong.

"I am currently using a pull-through carbide sharpener" is sufficient reason to buy a KME or other guided sharpener. Does it take skill? Sure. You need to not use too much pressure, you need to figure out when to move on to the next grit. But it doesn't take much skill. A couple of hours of messing around should do it.
 
The pull-through device is wearing your knives much faster than is necessary, and not getting them nearly as sharp as they could be.

A 600 mesh diamond plate and tap water will handle an unknown stable of knives, no matter how hard, but getting into free-hand sharpening is a pretty fair investment in time. It is a big deal for most people. I do it because I enjoy it, but I don't expect the next guy to feel the same way or make the investment in practice time.

Spyderco Sharpmaker is another good performer for well under $100US. Easy, fast, handles even very hard steels well.
 
When you use a pull through sharpener, you can see how much metal is taken off every time you do it. That's plenty of evidence that it's not good.
 
RICHARD BYARS said:
Will be comparing the KME and the Spyderco sharpeners
Click to expand...

I own and recommend the Spyderco tri-angle sharpmaker, BUT you will find it very tedious and frustrating to reprofile or fix a badly damaged edge with it. Plus you will be restricted to either a 15 degree per side or 20 degree per side edge angle. It's fine if that's what you prefer the majority of your knives to be at, but otherwise you'll have to freehand them. I assume that you're not quite ready for freehanding yet. You can buy coarse diamond rods for the sharpmaker to speed up the reprofiling process, but they're not cheap, especially when you add that to base price of the sharpmaker.

Of course, the KME system is very different, but way more versatile... and more expensive. For a beginner looking at that type of sharpener I strongly advise not spending too much money, and so I'd suggest going with the worksharp precision adjust instead. It's a lot cheaper and still pretty decent. It's also fairly popular from what I can tell, and the current iteration is pretty good for what it is.

Ultimately you're way better off learning freehand for a variety of reasons, but not everyone is willing to do that.
 
KME is a decent enough system. I used one for several years. But I would not recommend one now, because they're too small for knives much over 6" and because they use 4" stones, which are slower than newer systems that use 6" stones. If you can swing it, I'd recommend paying a little more for a Hapstone or TSProf system.
 
RICHARD BYARS said:
I have been using a pull through sharpener that I am sure is frowned upon in this site or taking my good knives to someone else to sharpen. I am considering buying a KME sharpener, but want to buy it for the right reason.
Am I damaging my knives by using the pull through sharpener or just not getting them as sharp as they could be?
I thing that I understand how to use the KME sharpener and it seems easy.......Does it take much skill to use the KME sharpener?
Any other reasons to use a KME sharpener???
Thanks
Click to expand...
KME is great and easy to use, and surprisingly quick. I just bring my edges up to the 1000 grit diamond stone and they are toothy and sharp as all get out. Don’t use the pull though sharpener. Those are for single moms with shitty kitchen cutlery.
 
Get a good quality strop too.......I find it therapeutic actually....... And it keeps the knives ready for anything!😉....

Takes a minute to get it down but once you do you won't have to sharpen a blade on a.stone unless you. Ding it..........All sorts of videos everywhere. On technique!!
 
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