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Yes, but as you pointed out, it's complicated. Some methods appear safe. For example, the Ken Onion coarse belt did not overheat on high speed, so I will feel comfortable using it on my machetes at low speed.
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Tips on Sharpening Cheap Steels
- Thread starter Mialum
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Sure. I dont disagree. Never said otherwise. It doesnt change the fact cheap steels are easier to sharpen. They dont stay sharp, they dont polish well, heck, they may not even get "as" ultimately sharp. But getting a working edge (for a probably short time) is "easier" with "cheap" steels. I dont think anyone is advocating it as a good choice.
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I have a pile of the cheap kitchen knives. A bunch of folders. Things I find curb shopping after someone moves out.
And boy o boy do I have the kitchen knives. With every single one being a renter, buy the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart, until we move again, block set of crappy knives. CheapO stainless.
You can get them sharp and yeap, It's easy. Run it out to 1000. Have fun and grind the edge at 15° or less. Not 17°, or 20°. Get that bad boy thin. Keep running a ceramic honing rod and it's as sharp as most people need.
And boy o boy do I have the kitchen knives. With every single one being a renter, buy the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart, until we move again, block set of crappy knives. CheapO stainless.
You can get them sharp and yeap, It's easy. Run it out to 1000. Have fun and grind the edge at 15° or less. Not 17°, or 20°. Get that bad boy thin. Keep running a ceramic honing rod and it's as sharp as most people need.
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Nope, they are more difficult to sharpen, assuming that you are using diamonds or CBN on the better steels. Obviously if you're trying to use an old oil stone to sharpen something like s90v or Maxamet, that's not going to work.
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I disagree. I’ve misspent enough time chasing burrs on cheap kitchen knives to know better.
Yes, the metal grinds away easy enough, but thats not the same as achieving a good edge.
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I concur.
I've sharpened annealed 1095 to an arm shaving edge. This is contrary to any advice you'll see most likely, but these types of blades don't sharpen well using burr based sharpening. Don't form a burr. Stop just short of one, or form one, then cut lightly directly into the stone to be sure it's gone. Then use light alternating passes to bring the edge to an apex. Take advantage of the low wear resistance and sneak up on the edge. Removing the burr is the difficult part for these situations. Don't give one a chance or it will hang on like grim death.
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Right, but short of magnification at a level I didn’t have, I couldn’t detect one. I’ve tested edges with a burr still in place with hardened steel. The annealed knife held an edge that would still clip a few arm hairs off long enough that I don’t think there was one there. Somewhere on some forum the amount of cardboard is documented but I don’t know where off the top of my head.
I think a big problem in general is that too many people follow instructions without actually thinking about what it is that they're doing. It's been repeated so often that you should form a burr that I think people are convinced that it's just a necessary part of the sharpening process, when in reality I think it's just the easiest way for someone to tell when they've finished making the proper angle along the entire width of the bevel on that side. Feeling for a burr is a quick and easy way to tell, but you don't actually need to form one, and the fact that you have formed one technically means that you took off just a little bit more material than you really needed to. That's not to say that it makes too much difference in the grand scheme of things, but technically it's true.
Right but unless you have a perfect apex to begin with, you cannot reform an apex along the length of the blade unless you remove "too much" material, and unless you are stopping frequently to observe the edge at high magnification you are not going to know what your apex looks like along that length. If you have any deformation or damage at the apex(which is essentially the definition of an edge that needs sharpening) then you will need to remove enough material to reform the apex. Hence you will need to form a burr.
Says who? The amount of material that you need to remove is the amount required to reach the apex. If you remove any more than that, then you will form a burr, which means you removed more material than you needed to.
Put the microscope away. People sharpened knives for thousands of years without microscopes. They used their naked eyes and it was plenty good enough.
If there is any wear along the edge at all, then the amount of material you need to remove will change depending on where on the apex you are sharpening. Which means that where the apex is more worn down the more you will need to remove from either side of that damage. How are you going to efficiently remove enough material to remove the damage/wear without forming a burr?
I think it's more a question of whether you want to try minimize the size of the burr you form, but either way you will still be forming a burr.
My point about observing the edge is that even if you carefully form the apex by minimizing the burr, you will likely still have dull spots along the edge where the damage to the edge was below the rest of the apex. You could then carefully and slowly keep going until that damage is gone, but I would imagine that would be very time consuming unless you started with a pretty good edge to start with.
Yes they did. They also observed stars with naked eyes till they invented telescopes.
They also didn't use x-rays to see how the bone is broken and find the best way to fix it.
And for sure they didn't polish their edges with naniwas, poltavas, shaptons, diamond compounds and all other sorts of honing and polishing high-end exotic stones you can find out there these days.
Right?
If they used their eyes they wanted to see what's going on when sharpening.
Funny thing, I can't see a burr with my naked eyes. I'm at the age I need to put on my glasses.
Can I use my glasses or is this cheating?
Some of us are also using other magnifying devices to see better.
It's entirely negligible. Just hold the same angle and you can disregard all the minor surface irregularities along the edge.
If you do it properly then there won't be one. You might be able to find one with a microscope, but you certainly won't find it with your eyes or your fingers. In other words, it doesn't matter and can be safely ignored.
Yes forming a burr is faster, and I did say that. My point is that it isn't actually necessary, and forming one means that you took off more material than you really needed to, but it's not the end of the world. That's all.
Well, like I said, you don't necessarily have to form a burr in the first place, so...
And your eyesight doesn't actually need to be that good to check the edge by sight. It's surprisingly easy. You just need a decent light source. You have learned how to do it, right?
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Microscopes are pretty important to make sure our ideas are still based in reality and not in our imagination.
Everybody is a sharpening master until we start looking closer at the edges.
We don't need a microscope every time we sharpen to make a sharp edge.
However, there is certainly something to be gained by using a microscope to evaluate our own work objectively rather than having an idealized version what we think is happening at the apex.
Sure yeah I think if it helps you understand things better then that's great, but not everyone needs that kind of help to learn, and it's just not required for the actual process itself unless you want to be super obsessive about getting your edge as close to perfect as possible, which is more of a personal thing. Unless you are talking about a situation that requires laboratory precision, anyway.
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I used to be strongly against microscopes. I had feelings similar to yours but over time that changed and I realized It was actually a great tool to evaluate my work more objectively and improve my skill and knowledge about what's actually happening at the edge not what I thought was happening.
For instance, I certainly don't pull the edge through wood to clean up any residual burr like I used to do 10 years ago.