welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen and today we've got Gage with
us again yep thanks gage you are from a sharp knife shop in in Hamilton
so today we're gonna talk a little bit about choosing the equipment you need to
sharpen your knife mm-hmm so there's some decisions to be made before you
even get to the point of sharpening absolutely so where would we start so I
guess where I normally start with people that come into the shop is again finding
out what their needs are okay are they getting into sharpening as something
that they feel that they can really get into as a hobby that they'll that they'd
like to expand over time or are they doing it simply out of necessity and
they just want the bare bones to get them started okay so let's say for
instance that you are really interested in Japanese knives or any knife for that
matter you just really want to get into maintaining your knife and keeping it as
sharp as possible we'll talk about the set up that I would I would go with so
okay this is the exact progression that I use for 90% of the knives that come
into the shop to be sharpened okay and it consists of three wet stones and all
arranged them properly in order here a truing stone or a flattening tool okay a
leather strop and then this isn't exactly what I use but this is a great
sort of rig that you can sharpen on that keeps every all the mess sort of
contained if you don't want to get into this you can very easily just sharpen
next to your sink you know I get a little bit of water splash around it's
not quite as luxurious as this but some place to keep your stones in the water
exactly yeah yep yeah so ideally you move through a progression of three
three wet stones now we might not always need all three of these stones but they
all have specific purposes and eventually at some point throughout the
life of your knife you will need all three of them so a coarse coarse grit
stone a medium grit stone and a fine grit stone coarse grit stones are gonna
range I've seen them as low as 50 I would say normally you're gonna see them
around the 200 grit range upwards of I'd say the cutoff is around 6 or 700
a coarse grit stone and as the name implies they are quite coarse they
remove material very quickly from your knife quite a bit of material yep and so
this would be if you've got a dip in your blade or good for minor repairs
minor reprofiling and reshaping the edge of your knife so when I talk about
reshaping the profile I'm talking about the curvature of the blade which is
definitely a more difficult process than than creating a new edge on your knife
which is pretty common you know after a few months of using your knife a lot
you'll need to reshape your edge you've got a rounded off edge and you need to
remove material to create that point again so that's what you're going to
achieve with this stone now once you come off of this 320 grit stone or
whatever coarse grit stone you're using you'll find that the edge is feeling
sharp but it's still quite toothy and and not as refined as you'd like it to
be and you're not going to get that really effortless cutting feel from it
so what we need to do next is refine our edge with a with progressively finer wet
stones and the process is exactly the same on each of the three wet stones
it's just the coarseness level that's going to affect the the how refine the
edge of your knife is okay so next we'll move into a medium grit stone this guy
here is a 1,000 grit that is pretty much that the standard like whetstone if you
go with one stone just to get started okay I make the argument that the 1000
has to be that first stone you get you know having either of these is not gonna
allow you to do what you need to on their own in combination altogether they
they work really well but if you just want one stone it's got to be this guy
and then you can kind of build from there so for regular maintenance yep you
haven't really screwed up your knife exactly you just need to sharpen it
exactly that tomato you're saying this thousand grit present yeah that's that's
a good point so you know reshaping minor repairs stuff like that general
maintenance just kind of bringing your edge back to life
and then into our fine grit stone I encourage people to hone their knives as
frequently as possible using a whetstone we talked previously about honing rod
and well I do I do I do agree that there's a time in a place for the honing
rod if you're in the middle of prep and you don't want to bust out your
whetstone a couple swipes on the honing rod is necessary sometimes but I find
that it's much easier to be inconsistent on on a honing rod and therefore not
getting the best results and not really maintaining your knife super well so
using a whetstone is going to allow you to be much more consistent with the
angle that you're using and whilst achieving the exact same thing refining
your edge okay so what I try to get people to do is when they get a
brand-new knife set yourself up with a really high grit whetstone and use that
to hone your knife as frequently as possible okay when I was cooking
professionally I would come home at the end of every night and hone all my
knives on a 4000 grit stone an 8,000 grit stone and then hit it on the
leather strop which we'll talk about in a second here and what that does is
allow you to keep your knives razor sharp all the time spend little to no
time doing it I've been about two or three minutes on each knife and I would
remove little to no material every time I honed my knife thereby prolonging the
life of my edge if I'm constantly going down to this 320 grit sanding off quite
a bit of material potentially taking absolutely I'm just I'm just shortening
the life of the knife it's gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller until
there's nothing left to sharpen anymore so once we've refined our edge all the
way up to this 5000 grit stone the final step would be to use this leather strop
here very similar to what barbers use or some still use I only do that here your
straight razor shave okay but it's simply just two pieces of leather one
side is a little bit more coarse as sort of like similar to suede and then the
other side much finer so very similar to with the wet stones will use the coarser
side first and then and then flip over and use this this side some guys will
load their straps with with compound got a diamond compound and stuff like that I
haven't done a ton of experimentation with that I my standard is if
I can shave my arm hairs with my knife then it's it's as sharp as it needs to
be and I can achieve that just using this strop so it's so I can't imagine
the leather takes anything away no takes nothing away and I'm gonna I
have I have an engineer buddy at Mack who I'm gonna take the strop - and we're
gonna figure out what's happening we have a scientific basis but
pseudoscience right now is going to tell us that don't
worry about why it works just works okay okay I mean and it's one of those it
just works for hundreds if not thousands of years
exactly they say that these are sort of in the range of like 10,000 to 15
upwards of 15,000 grit so it is essentially just moving into a further
refinement of the edge getting rid of any sort of little micro burrs that
might still remain on your knife and then once you're done on the strop you
test your knife out if if you're shaving then you're if you're good to go if not
then there's work to be done you know figure it out okay so just to recap I
come in all I want to do is maintain my knives keep sharp I'm not I'm not gonna
take it as a hobby yep and I say I want one stone well one
stone one stone you're going to point me towards I'm gonna point you towards this
one that stone here and then I come in and I say I'm a little bit more
interested yeah I'm having news 1000 it's working well I take care of my
knives like yeah I wipe them down after every use I'm not sure that they don't
get you know there's no chunks out of them yeah where should I go next yeah so
that's a good that's a good question so if to your point you're you're on the
good side you're you're into your knives you've maintained them really well
they're not super old let's say they're within a year a year old or so and
you're you're finding it very easy to get the edge back with this 1,000 grit
stone I would probably send you towards the
the 5000 grit or pick up a straw ' okay the 1000 grit in combination with the
strop is very effective as effective as the one thousand five thousand then
strop no okay but I would almost argue that the results you're gonna get from
the 1000 and then the strop is better than if you're gonna go from the 1000 to
the 5000 okay that makes sense yeah you know we're getting a little bit
convoluted here it makes sense to me yeah that's another thing is it's a lot
of experimentation even in Japan I find that every sharpener has their own sort
of method and that's in that and that is very important because the way that I
would do it and would be different than the way you were sure and so we wouldn't
we need a different yeah progression for sure the same result absolutely yeah and
I'm happy to share my personal experiences with people but you you
sharpening is your own journey you need to figure it out for yourself
but like I said I would probably go 1,000 to start then get a strop in there
then go with the 5000 grit stone and then as your knife ages and you need to
start getting into repairs or thinning out your blade and stuff like that
then you're gonna get into this lower grit stone also for instance if you
let's say you're not great at maintaining your knives you're coming in
and you're like man I haven't Trevor my knives in years they are in real bad
shape like you know I've tried sharpening with yeah yeah something like
that yeah I mean this might even be a little bit too far for this guy here but
yeah you're you need something you need you need to remove a good amount of
material from your knife then I would probably set you up with with both of
these stones 320 and a 1000 if you lighten up on your hand pressure get
them out and and really sort of take your time at the end on this 1000 you
can still get a good refined polished edge with it and if your knife is in
really poor shape you're gonna have a really tough time removing the material
you need to with a 1000 okay not to say it can't be done but it's murder you're
gonna spend like we were talking about that afternoon in the garage we're just
going working out and it gets it gets old pretty quick
okay and then so this is truing stone yeah so they're referred to as truing
stones a flattening stone I don't know what I call them I call it this called a
diamond plate it's made by a band called a Toma and they're kind of like the
standard for for sharpening or for flattening plates there are other brands
out there I personally really like these guys and these guys are going to let me
talk about flatten your stone so over time your your removing material both
from your knife and from your stones don't yeah yeah so you're gonna get sort
of wonkiness happening over time and when we get into the sharpening process
we'll learn about how important it is to be consistent with your angles and if
your stone isn't flat you can't be consistently consistent no you're not
going to get a good edge no so every once in a while you need to run it over
the truing stone or the flattening yep so for instance say I have my stone in
my rig here I in fact am a huge maintenance over over fixing guy yep so
I would rather do ten seconds of work hundred times then whatever the math
works out to be yeah I'm trying to say yeah so between every knife I'll use my
my truing stone just to to flatten things out if I was doing this maybe so
too but but just quickly remove material using this flattening stone get
everything flat and that way I'm just consistently maintaining a nice flat
stone and ever having to again spend the afternoons yeah and so these are these
are my stones they don't get used that often I'm not great at sharpening my
knives but I've noticed that my my stones are smaller yes and I don't feel
comfortable on these stones I don't feel like I've got enough knife contact yeah
what what I'm what I'm working it so bigger is better
bigger is better yes I would I would make that argument like that point you
made earlier with the surface area to the to the honing rod same thing goes
here just a little bit skinnier not quite as
long so you're not going to be as efficient using it and it again like to
your point leads to inconsistency with with how you're contacting your
your knife to the stone yeah definitely and so this one has a little rubber base
this one has a wooden base but this so this is an example of a sharpening rig
that you can get set up this sink bridge and this stone holder are two products
that I carry at the shop sink bridge as the name implies bridges any sort of
open area so what is B that's just saying Hotel pan gastro as some people
call them great to have something to work over top of catch all that water
and and sediment from the stone coming off that way you're not making a big
mess and then to get your stone you know when they're when they're brand new the
stones are fine they've got a good amount of height to them but as they get
really small they get to be a little bit tough to work with as we flatten them
down and they get skinnier and skinnier so having a stone holder that you set
your stone into gets it up off the surface you're working on makes it much
more luxurious to work with you could even work without this and just the the
stone holder and it works to keep it stable as well yeah definitely yeah okay
so we've got the basics we've got our stones we're gonna come back in the next
video and we're going to sharpen jars and some stuff yeah hey thanks for
stopping by you get soon
how many knives a day will you sharpen there's days where I get like 40 knives
in there's days when I get 0 knives in I would say good sort of like average
would probably be in like the 8 to 10 mark a day
you