Thread: Knife sharpener - Scary sharp or Wicked Edge

While not as durable, I prefer simple flat grinds to convex grind edges as I can maintain them with a stone easily enough

Originally Posted by hotbarrels

Knives flat ground to 0 are ..... what?

The main reason I went away from “sharpening systems” and took the time to learn to convex sharpen (even on flat ground blades, therefore technically a convex micro bevel) is that once in the field and forced to stone a blade (as opposed to strop or steel a blade), unless you can perfectly match the angles established by your sharpening system, you will never get a sharp edge again until you have ground your finely tuned micro bevel to that of your “natural hand”. Therefore, you are (IMHO) better served to spend the time and learn to hand sharpen your knives. In doing so, if you have to sharpen in the field your blade is already “set to your hand”.

If you are ‘sharpening for others’ then a ‘standardised’ angle profile is probably better.

As a young lad I was always astounded at how sharp my granddad and my dad could get their knives for home kill (my granddad turned to home butchery during the depression). A couple of minutes spent on a spit covered water stone and a few swipes with the old school super smooth steel had the forearm shaved as smooth as a new borns bum.
I still have a couple of their knives - they are all convex ground.

There is a reason why ‘jigs’ (sharpening systems) have been developed for micro bevel sharpening - it’s not easy to achieve repeatedly by hand.
With practice, a convex edge is much easier to achieve by hand than a micro bevel.

Therefore, if you read between the lines, I’m just lazy and taking the easy option by convex grinding.


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Yeah most hand sharpened edge bevels are going to be convex anyway. Also for the cost of those systems you can have a set of top quality stones.

When talking convex grinds I'm talking a tall primary bevel grind like the bark rivers. There are definate positives to them but I do thinkthe out weight the(comparitive) hassle of sharpening

What about these things: https://knifesharpners.nz/