The Quickest Way to a Professional Edge
I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU but I have suffered from attempting to use knives that are incorrectly sharpened – holes in skins, cut hands and stabbed shins. For years I would go hunting with knives that I thought I had sharpened to a shaving edge, only to lose it half way through skinning a fox or goat.
I’d then drag out a diamond hone or steel and get the blade back to some sort of edge to complete the job but I felt, justifiably, that my sharpening skills left a lot to be desired. Without instruction in putting an initial coarse edge of an appropriate angle onto a blade I began to suspect that I was applying too broad an angle to my blades and, over time they developed a round-shouldered edge that would be more use as a wedge than a fine cutting implement. Naturally, an edge of this nature could only hold a touch-up steel or light honing for a very short time, if indeed such measures worked, because half of the time, I was probably only working on the shoulder and not the edge.
It got to such a frustrating point that, having access to the internet, I began to explore websites which instructed the surfer in correctly applying a correct edge to blades. Now, having something like thirty knives in my household, the prospect of working up correct bevels on all of them with an oilstone was a daunting prospect, so I sent a few of my most beloved knives to a friend with a manual knife sharpener which uses conventional stones which are set in a jig at consistent angles to impart durable shaving sharp edges.
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