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Beginner's Guide to Whetstone Sharpening

May 30, 2021
I'm going to be blunt, using dull knives in the kitchen is one of the seven deadly sins of serious cooking, the only time I got seriously hurt was because I was using a dull knife to cut a carrot and I'll show you. Guys, the picture of my fingers sewn together, so if you're a little squeamish, skip to this timestamp. Luckily for me those fingers actually healed and there's nothing wrong with that but I hope that shows you the importance of having sharp knives in the kitchen a sharp knife is a happy knife and a sharp knife is a safe knife so sit back , let's watch this video and go over the

beginner

's

guide

on how to sharpen a knife, so today I'm going to teach you all the basics that you need.
beginner s guide to whetstone sharpening
I know how to sharpen with a

whetstone

and this has quickly become my favorite way to sharpen knives and there is a real kind of Zen to the processes, enjoyable like practical work. I feel like we can't do much these days except sharpen. your knives is one of these hands-on activities that I have really come to enjoy. Before I show you the end and

sharpening

of the knife, today I want to go over the four basics of

sharpening

that will really help. a lot of your knowledge and it will make everything make a lot more sense when we go to sharpen this knife today, so the four fundamentals of sharpening are abrasive, sharpening angle, burr and consistency, to sharpen a knife you need .
beginner s guide to whetstone sharpening

More Interesting Facts About,

beginner s guide to whetstone sharpening...

What we are doing today is removing metal with an abrasive which will be our Japanese style wet stones and these wet stones have been around for years and years but now they are becoming much more popular in home kitchens so these wet stones come in a variety of different grits I have a 320 grit stone, a 1000 grit stone and a 5000 grit stone and grit refers to the size of the abrasive particles that are actually in the wet stones, so wet stones Coarser or lower grit will wear down the metal faster but also leave larger micro-dentations or just make scratches, fine wet stones will wear down the metal much more slowly and leave a more polished edge, so there are some different opinions on what grits make up a coarse stone versus a medium stone versus a fine stone but in an edge in Chad Ward's kitchen, he suggests that coarse stones are anything below 800 grit, 800 to 2000 grit is a medium or medium fine stone and then anything over 3000 will be a fine or polishing stone, so in practical terms coarse stones are used for a Brady metal to repair minor chips.
beginner s guide to whetstone sharpening
Medium or medium fine grit stones are all-purpose stones used for sharpening and setting the true edge and high or fine grit stones are used for polishing the edge. Today I'm only going to use the 1000 grit stone and the 5000 grit stone for polishing because this is the most typical example I would say, although I wanted to point out that you can only use a 1000 grit stone if you want and you can still get a really good edge, but now that we're done with abrasive, let's talk about sharpening angles, so to add to my sentence in the previous section, what you were actually doing when sharpening a knife was removing the knife from the metal at a specific angle, so that When you look at a typical double bevel knife, the edge is made up of two angles that meet in the middle.
beginner s guide to whetstone sharpening
This will be set by the person or manufacturer who made the knife and is usually between 15 and 25 degrees on one side, the lower the degree the sharper the edge because there will be less resistance when cutting something, so given that information, do you need to use some crazy measurement to try to figure out what exactly the sharpness of your knife is? No, and this is something that I think is very much designed for

beginner

s. What we're going to do today is simply try to match the sharpness that our manufacturer already established and it's actually quite easy to do that to account for the burr.
I think it helps to understand how knives dull in the first place, so it doesn't. No matter how expensive or cheap your knives are, you know that this $11 knife is going to dull and this several hundred dollar knife here is also going to dull over time and even after using a knife for several months, it's the edge may not be seen. It's different to your eye, but at a microscopic level it's very different, so the job of a bonito's edge is to concentrate a lot of pressure to cut and naturally this will cause the edge to flatten or bleed at a microscopic level.
It looks like a lot of jagged pieces of metal and it makes sense why that knife doesn't cut as well, so to start remedying those microscopic indentations and little Nick's and the things we need to create a bird, the bird is a raised lip of metal which is formed when one side of the knife's edge meets the others while sharpening and you may not be able to see a bird, but you can feel it with the pad of your thumb or feel it catch your fingernail to create the burr we sharpen inside one of the knife until it meets the B side and creates the curvature of the metal along the entire edge, then to make sure the knife wears constantly, we sharpen the other side of the knife until it curves again and basically you continue that process to weaken the burr until it is So for the bird, you can imagine what happens when you take a paper clip and bend it back and forth and eventually it weakens and breaks, that's what we want to do with the burr, because after the burr disappears, that will go away. us with that B shape we're looking for, so the last fundamental key to sharpening is consistency, you need to be consistent in the angle that you hold the knife at while sharpening on both sides, you also need to be consistent that you're creating a burr along the entire edge of the knife from heel to tip and this is really what will allow you to get good results when sharpening so obviously as beginners we probably won't be consistent and that's perfectly fine but as you go on and on In this, you will find that you will become much better at it.
I probably sharpen about 15 or 20 knives at this point and I tell you that every time I know I get a little better, but that doesn't mean you can't be successful the first time because I did it and I was able to pass the paper and honestly, it's a of the best feelings, with that said, let's get into our tutorial on how to sharpen this knife. Alright, this is the third time I've shot this approach. The first time it was out of focus because my camera reset to manual focus when the battery died and I didn't realize the second time my top down view ran out of space and I didn't realize until it was already done, so what I did was dull this knife again which I wouldn't suggest doing but you can't really sharpen it it can't cut well anymore and when you do it grabs which is not good so I have dulled this knife again , we're going to sharpen it now and go over this, so as I mentioned before, I'm not going to use my coarse 320 grit stone because it doesn't really have any chips or minor repairs. or things like that, I actually have another knife that has some chips repaired and I do a separate video showing how I take care of it, so we'll just use 1000 and 5000 grit stones.
I have the Shapton ceramic backsplash. and they go stones and they splash and they go all that means you have to do is take some water and just splash it and then you're ready to go and start sharpening there are things called soaking stones just check the type you have soaking sounds , you have to submerge them completely and I think you have to wait until, like all bubbles, there are no air bubbles left or something, but whatever you have put in, just check to see if it's a splash stone or a soaking stone and then hold it with your knife what you're going to do is take three fingers, put them on the handle, then you're going to take your thumb, place it on the pad and place your index finger right on the spine of the knife and this will lock your wrist and help it maintain that sharpening angle so now that we have our abrasive set up it's time to talk about the sharpening angle I created earlier so the easiest way as a beginner to know where your sharpening is is to use the magic marker trick or the Sharpie marker trick and Basically all you do is color right on the edge of your knife and as you sharpen you'll be able to see exactly where you sharpened and where you didn't so I'm just going to color both sides of the knife. edge as best we can and don't worry about ruining your knife.
I'll show you how to remove it, it's very easy, but now that we have this, we'll be able to see exactly where we sharpen as we go. and to do that we're going to take our knife, take our handle and then I like to put the knife at a 45 degree angle right on the stone and then I start lifting it until it feels right and it's like it's a feeling, don't you think too much into it, but what we're going to do is take a couple of hits with a push and pull method and we can see exactly where we have that strange marker that means that's where we've been wearing away that metal, so with your push blows and pulling is a back and forth motion and moving away from you will be an edge strike and then toward me will be a leading edge motion so I'm just putting pressure on my edge with back strokes and no pressure on my edge with chokes main because I don't want to damage the stone as I come back to myself, so with that being said, I'm going to do a couple of hits just on this bottom edge. to start to see if we are sharpening at the right angle, so take this handle at a 45 degree angle, lift it up and lightly press just on the edge, back strokes and let's start making our jokes, so I hope you can see this on the top down view, but We've started to wear away some of that marker on the edge of the night and I'm looking at this right now and it looks like we're at the right angle this time, you can see down here at the bottom.
I didn't go all the way down and that's because I didn't have that on my knife edge, but up here I did a really good job, so we're going to keep the same angle and there's a really good magic marker graph, bad Japanese. knife imports. I'll link it in the description where you guys can see based on what your Sharpie looks like if your angle is too steep or maybe too shallow, but that's good for me, we're definitely on the edge which is a good sign. , so we'll go ahead and maintain that sharpening angle throughout the entire sharpening.
Okay, now that we know what our taper angle is, we're going to do a pass, so I'm going to do a heel pass the entire time. I walk up to the tip of the knife doing that push and pull motion just putting light pressure on our final movements and I like to make maybe I don't know four or five passes when I start, especially if it's a dollar knife, but you really we're going to base it on the field, no one can give you the exact number of strokes you need to do, so let's start from the heel and then work up to the toe and then as we work with the knife, just walk. your fingers slide them to keep them in the center of the blades, right in the center of the stone and then for the tip, you may have to lift a little to try to match the edge of the tips and then we give it the come back to this and see how we did it, so let me wipe the water off, so once I wipe it off you can see that we made a lot of contact with the edge of the knife.
All the Sharpie above is actually not on the edge it is just on the flat piece. down the side so that sharp part where there's no Sharpie is right on the edge and that's what we need to make it look cool so we're going to do an apple nut a couple of passes on this side and then while we're doing that I'm going to start to be able to start to feel a burr and see if it's creating a bird that's going to be on this side of the knife, it's going to splash my stone and we're going to keep lifting the tip. and again just looking at the magic marker we're fine, we haven't gone too high, we're keeping the same sharpening angle that we need to keep and now I'm going to start feeling a burr so I can definitely start.
You can definitely feel a burr at this point and as soon as you feel a burr just flip it to the other side, if you feel it from heel to toe you don't need to continue on this side you can flip it. Then I felt the bird. Now I'm going to turn it around and this is one of those parts where it's said that it's different for me compared to other people who do that. So, what I like to do and honestly, I find it very easy. just switch to your other hand and then you're literally mirroring the exact same stroke.
You don't have to think about anything. What you can do is if you want to hold it in one hand, basically, your thumb and your index finger are going to change. places, so instead of your thumb being down here, it's going to go to the spine and instead of your index finger on the spine, it's going to come here and you're going to do this back and forth motion again, it's whatever feels most comfortable for you. . I have tried both and for me I find that I am more consistent if I just switch hands and follow the exact same process,so let's do it and sharpen the other side of the knife and this kind of bend for the end of the night is a little bit awkward, you have to go with the edge of the night and then as we can see when I turn this around again, we're looking pretty good, we've sharpened where we've lost material on the bottom edge and it looks like we're just getting the edge based on my feedback from that magic marker and you can see right here.
I didn't get the tip so I need to go back and make sure I get the tip here so I'm going to do that right now and make sure I get the tip by just tilting it up and really making sure that I'm getting the pressure that I need on that tip. You may be able to see this from above. see, but there's a little area of ​​the tip that I don't quite understand, so I'm going to adjust my angle a little bit and I'm really and there we go, it came off that time, so we know they're good and again, I'm going to feel my Bercy if it's still on the other side of the knife and I can't really feel it yet, so I'll do another pass on this side and flip again.
No more making sure I haven't sharpened my knife too much. We look good. In fact, there's a little bit down here where I haven't really touched the edge, so I want to make sure I understand that. I really need to make sure that the keel is complete all the way to the tip of this knife because we want to make sure that everything is sharp and not just the center parts, yeah, so it looks pretty good, so now. I'm going to feel my burger and yeah I have a burr from the heel to the toe so that's a good sign for me and then at this point I'm going to move on to my highest stone and this is going to be my polishing stone this is my five thousand grit and you could continue with this stone if you wanted to, but what I like to do is polish that edge because the fine grit will give us this really nice polished edge and smooth everything out. and I like to do one or two passes using the exact same strokes and then move on to the strapping, a lot of people will just go straight to the strapping method but I like to do a couple. it happens exactly like I was doing on this stone, but only at the highest grit, so actually what I'm going to do is fill in my Sharpie on the blade to make sure we keep an angle with all the consistency. and this is a great tip for you to use well, so it's not colored perfectly, but I hope you can tell based on this and if at any point you're not sure, continue applying your marker as you go through this process .
We're done on the left hand on this side, so now we're going to move over to our right side because the burr is underneath and now we're just going to make a couple of passes on our higher grit stone and all I'm doing is keeping the Exactly the same method, there is nothing that changes at this time. I will show you the purchasing method. Could we do this? So I'm going to do another one, probably one or two passes on this side, one or two passes on the other side and then Go to rub, so start exactly the same way, getting my 45 degree angle to the stone, keeping light pressure with my fingers on my finishing movement and making sure I have that stiff sharpening angle with my wrist and let's go and just lift. a little bit to make sure I understand that tip, sometimes it can be a little hard to get and let's see, if we turn the knife over, you can see I did a pretty good job again.
I need to clean that tip. a little bit and actually towards the base here there's a little bit of sharpening right on the edge of needing to get it so for this next pass I'm going to focus on this part of the knife and do a couple more strokes here and then. I make sure I really get that tip, but other than that I can feel the burr on this side of the knife, so we're doing pretty good, so I'm going to do one more pass concentrating on the bottom and the tip of the knife and just going up. lightly the knife again, not really focusing on this area because we're good there and then we really try to get the tip right, the tip is really the hardest part and you're going to have to lift the handle up a little bit.
Kinda sometimes mm-hm I still don't understand that tip so I'm going to get the tip here there we go this time I got the tip so you can see now we have this nice clean marker line that means we're in good shape. shape. and now I can feel that burr from the heel to the toe, so now I'm going to do the same thing on the other side and this process is just going to weaken and make that burr smaller and smaller and as you actually sharpen what you're dealing with. The thing to do is get the burr as close to the other side as possible because really what we're trying to do is get that V shape and if we keep going over the burr like this and then turn it over. a lot more, a lot more, it's not really doing much for the knife, what you want to do is flip it, then flip it a little more, a little more, a little more, and finally we'll get as close to that as possible. as V shape as we can get, so now I'm going to do the other side of the knife exactly the same process, probably do another two passes again lifting that tip up.
I know I've had trouble getting this right. one, so I'm going to make sure that's a focus area, let's flip the knife over and yeah, look at that much better work down here, there's a little bit more Sharpie than I want, so I'm going to clean up. that, but we're going to do, we're going to clean up down here just a little bit. I'm not even going to go all the way through the knife, but now I'm just going to clean up that bottom part, really focus my area. there and yeah, that looks pretty good, we have a nice clean Sharpie separation of what's on the actual edge versus everything on top of it, so we're ready to move on, now we're ready to move on to our strapping, like this that strapping is Basically, it's going to be these fluid movements from heel to toe, all in one fell swoop, and you can do this on your stones, a lot of people do it, in fact, there are these leather straps and, in fact, even you can do it on your 1000 grit stone. you can sharpen a knife from the end and only with a 1000 grit medium grit stone and in fact I would definitely recommend trying it just to help you understand the process a little better but for me I really like to polish that edge and let it fall.
On this and again, we're really, you know, we're going to realign ourselves and try to line everything up as close as possible, so to settle what we do is the bird is on this side of the knife, yeah, we just finished. I can barely feel it so what we're going to do is do these swooping motions starting at the toe and moving all the way to the heel and basically what I like to do is just do this gentle pushing motion and all it's going to do is look So. so you start with the tip slightly raised and matching the same angle that we've had the whole time we're going to do our rubbing motion and again if you want you can fill in with Sharpie for this and my Sharpie is just doesn't work at all on this one. period, I think I've messed up a little bit, but I hope you can see it, but if you do it or use this Sharpie method, just fill out everything you need to make sure you're comfortable.
You're actually sharpening at the right angle so you have to be exactly the same way to hold the knife but it's just the different movements so starting from the tip moving forward and I like to do ten on a side so eight seven six five four three two. one and as you can see, that edge is nice and it cleaned up from the Sharpie didn't really do a great decent job in the end, but there's a little bit that I missed, which is okay, we'll get to that next time. -around but now I like to turn around and do ten on this side and the amount of strokes I'm doing is honestly kind of arbitrary.
I only choose ten. I go 10 10 8 8 6 6 4 4 2 2 and then I alternate and do 1 1 until I'm comfortable with the way my knife cuts, so we do 10 on this side again, starting from heel to toe, exactly the same angle that we have had during all this sharpening time and we simply make smooth strokes from heel to toe sorry from toe to heel that's right 5 4 3 2 1 now it's our turn 8 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 here we go and again you can feel this bird, it should be turning around and it should be quite small at this point, but you should be able to feel it slightly with the pad of your thumb, so let's do 6 now 6 5 4 3 2 1 6 5 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 2 1 2 1 now that we get there all I do is alternate 1 1 for a while, so I'm going to go 1 1 1 one very With light movements you don't need a lot of pressure and if there's a bird, I mean, it should be pretty hard to feel and so what we can do now is just do a quick cut test and let me dry the easiest way to get the marker off. it's just take a little bit of nail polish remover and a little bit of acetone and then you're just going to rub it along the edge and it will literally come off, it's actually great so you put a little bit on the edge, it just runs. goes down the edge I just make a blank that comes right out I don't know why I like to do that right so I just wipe the knife clean I have that marker up there and we just do a quick cut test so take like a newspaper a little magazine don't use office paper it's a little harder, it's easier to cut magazine paper, something lighter matte or newspaper will be a better reference point to use, but basically we just want to cut from heel to toe to make sure it's completely sharp and let's go and then if we cut like this you know we should be in pretty good shape again it just slides through the paper you know as long as we slide across the paper which is usually pretty sharp . enough for most home kitchens, some people do the haircut test where they just write on a little bit of hair or you can just do it on your arm and see if it shaves off a little bit of hair, you know, we're usually in a nice situation.
Good spot, so now we have our sharp knife. I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope you found the information useful. I know when I was trying to learn I felt like everything was scattered and finding that book to be an asset in the kitchen was a big task. help me connect, you know what we're really trying to accomplish when we use these wet stones, so I highly suggest you read the book if you want, but that's what's going to end up for the video, I hope you guys. Enjoyed, go out and cut some knives. I'll leave you with a little cut and I'll see you in the next one.

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