Touching up higher end steels

[nlewman]

I'm a little confused here. I have heard people say that theu touch up their knives in higher end steels every day, or close to it. I use a sharpmaker, and for say, s30v, would you recommend just doing a few passes on the flats of the fine stones (5 or so on each side) at the end of the day to keep it extra sharp? Just at the microbevel? Can you oversharpen? I can get knives pretty sharp with the sharpmaker, I just want some advice on how often to sharpen and how y'all do it. Thanks! I am also getting an s110v manix soon, any tips on the upkeep of that?

 

[wiredbeans]

It depends on the type of blade and the edge angle, if you have 15 dps and you use sharpmaker to touch up assuming you are using the 40 degree side, that will add a 3rd bevel in no time if you do 5 passes every day and you micro bevel becomes very pronounced.

Micro bevel should be no more than a width of 2 hairs, hence the name micro.

People interpret touch up differently, for those that use the knife hard, it would be a light sharpen on the fine rods and then extra fine without going to the medium. This will fix the micro chips that developed during hard use such as cutting dense card boards, plastic straps, zip ties, wood carving etc...

Others do touch up by stroping, it's more of edge honing and polishing, it doesn't remove as much material and your knife's edge stay aligned and "refined"

I touch up using strops if I don't feel any chips by running my index nail perpendicular on the edge.
If I can feel more than 2 nicks or larger chips, I will micro bevel to remove them and then back to strop until the micro bevel gets too wide (easily visible although still very thin). At this point I will resharpen to my original angle i.e. 10, 12, 15 dps depending on the blade geometry and steel type.

Learn how to strop and you will experience a different level of sharpness and you are not wasting your precious blade stock sharpening all the time.