Sharpmaker vs. 20CV/S35VN/S30V

[aVyD]

Does anyone have any experience sharpening these steels on the spydie's medium/fine/ultra fine stones? I own all 3 of these steels and I've been told that I need diamond stones to be able to sharpen them due to the high carbide content.

 

[kreisler]

s30v and 204uf are no problem.

 

[Obsessed with Edges]

If you ever need to thin or reprofile, or fix an extremely dull or damaged thick edge in steels like S30V, the ceramic rods will be extremely slow. That's when you'll really wish you had the diamond rods.

If your existing edge is already pretty sharp and in good, thin cutting geometry, you'll probably do OK for a while with simple maintenance sharpening. With ceramics though, there'll come a time when you might notice these steels losing some bite, becoming more polished/burnished, and it'll get progressively more difficult to fully restore it without at least a few passes on diamond first. You might spend an hour trying to tune it up on the ceramics first without getting that original 'bite' back, and then restore that bite in a handful of passes on the diamond, in a minute or two. That's when the working advantage of the diamond becomes obvious, over the ceramics alone.

 

[Alberta Ed]

Go with diamond with those steels.