what angle suit what best?

[fastcamo]

what degree do you all sharpen your knives to?
the main use would be for game cleaning and skinning,
I use the lansky diamond set with 17-30

 

[Cougar Allen]

 

[Habeas Corpus]

what degree do you all sharpen your knives to?
the main use would be for game cleaning and skinning,
I use the lansky diamond set with 17-30

Depends on the steel and the blade geometry. I normally try to keep the angles as low as possible, usually to something like 10 degrees each side or even lower, but then I tend to stick to steel like M2, 1095, ZDP and VG-10 nowadays all of which can be run fairly hard.

With softish, carbide-rich steels like most S30V you can't really keep the angle that low. With typical S30V I tend to stick to 15 degress.

Hans

 

[Dog of War]

IMO 15 degrees/side is about as high as you should ever have to go, and that's for a REALLY hard use blade that's going to see a lot of side impact, prying, and other rough action.

Even for a heavy chopper 12 deg./side should hold up fine for most work if the steel's at all decent. I also like 12 deg./side for my EDC folders and small fixed blades ... they do after all get used for stuff like cutting/stripping wire, scraping, and probably a few things knives technically aren't designed for.

For a dedicated, high-performance cutter that is to be used with skill and abuse avoided, edges of 10 deg/side or less are desirable, but IMO you need a steel that can handle it: generally fine grain with not high carbide content and/or small aggregates, fairly hard with good edge stability. A more obtuse microbevel will help with less optimal steels.

 

[fastcamo]

im sorry i forgot to say the steel i was using, it is 1095 and O1 ...
so for a 15 degree angle thats the 30 mark on the lansky right, or am i way off base there?