I have been watching with interest some videos on You Tube by virtuovice. He regularly thins his hunting knives to improve the cutting abilities.
Inspired by him I bought a cheap Boker hunting knife (original bevels were 25Ëšso a total of 50Ëšonly good as an axe) it is a heavy little knife 5mm on the spine 440 stainless since I do not have the WE as yet I did it on waterstones 150-1000-5000 then DMT extra extra fine . The right hand side of the blade I tapered from about 2mm down from the spine to the edge once I was through to the edge I then put a convex bevel going from about 3Ëš at the point to about 5Ëšby the handle . The left side I convex tapered from about 8mm in from the edge to the edge then I put a convex bevel of about 12Ëš at the point graduating back to the handle to about 15Ëš. The result it shaves, slips through paper & feather sticks beautifully the blade probable would not take beating against logs but it is very sharp in its original state it would barely cut anything .
It seems to me that the more I sharpen whether it be currently with an EP and shortly with a WE or Japanese bench stones or diamonds that the most important thing is the taper to the edge whether this be chefs knives or any other sort of knife .
We can all make a sharp bevel but if the metal behind it is too wide it is pretty immaterial how sharp the edge is this is particularly so with kitchen knives.
I was given a Santoku wannabe knife the other day it was thick heavy and blunt perhaps they made it heavy to make up for the poor edge I had to re-profile the lower third of the blade to the edge should have binned it really but I decided that since this cook had bought it herself I had better sort it since the other knives were not so bad.Apart from the thinning it been a cheap knife the steel was not laminated so it was quite tough the end result was a knife that was very sharp and did what it had never done since the knife had not been sharpened when it was given to me. I think I would be wary about doing that to a cheap knife for someone without charging a price possible more than it would cost to buy probable a job for Tuffy’s Kally . Still not practical for me at the moment since I live in an apartment & if I am sharpening at home it is in the kitchen I don’t think a belt sander in a kitchen is very wholesome.
Below are some images of the Boker. The first image is upside down so the left side in the picture is actually the right side!
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