WE sat. fare – great – long video today- knives

[tuffy braithwaite]

The fare started out slow, no knives until after like 9:30 and then here they come by the basket and bags full – o m g – sharpened 10 there and 2 sets of hand pruning shears. Brought 2 bags home – 1 bag of 4 and 1 bag with wooden block – 8 knives and 1 pair of scissors.

In the block are all henckels and two are serrated, so thanks to my learned friend on the Wicked Edge forum – Mr Leo I now have a new and greatly improved way to sharpen those dreaded serrated knives and boy does it get them sharp – omg — I like it.

You can ask Leo to post a link to the video if u want to watch it. – I added at the last of this video how I made it work for me. I am very pleased with the results as u will see.
See you again on Thursday.

Good luck to everyone and as my you tube friend in NY (Gavko) would say – don’t cut yourself.

Video is long today – 33 mins.
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[Eamon Mc Gowan]

Tuffy,
I only scrub on low grits forming a burr. I do it on occasion with a troublesome knife. I have had them turn out scary sharp doing it though. I got in a conversation with one of the forum members and it was his opinion that it was causing uneven edges as I recall??
I think after listening to you today, I am going to give it another whirl? By the way it was me who asked how high on the grits at the markets? I was concerned fine ceramics might not have enough tooth for kitchen knives? Do you ever get feed back? I ask cause I do mostly folders and hunting knives?
Thank you,
Eamon

[Leo Barr]

Here is the link to the video that sent Tuffy for sharpening serrated knives .

[Leo Barr]

Tuffy once your ceramic is all greyed up clean it with some Ajax abrasive kitchen cleaner possible with a scotch pad since once the whole surface is glazed it will not sharpen well .
I and pleased to see you have had some good results on the serrated blades .
I would recommend putting a lanyard on the ceramic hone since they are very brittle and will brake if dropped.

[Leo Barr]

Eamon
I have posted the video it is by Richard Blain his EZ Cooking etc it was nicholas6225 who drew my attention to these videos in the discussion on sharpening Japanese knives with 70/30-60/40 grinds so a big thank you should go to Nicholas for passing on the Richard Blain videos I would recommend all his sharpening videos although they are mainly todo with using Japanese stones .
All sharpening videos have something to offer Jende has another approach to sharpening serrations on a Tjiro serrated knife whose serrations are less peaked and they are possible similar to some of the new Kai Shun serrated knives .http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNbOSpViFl0&feature=player_embedded

[Eamon Mc Gowan]

Leo, a big thank you for the tip!! I have been using the dmt files. This looks way better!:-) Would you guys have a link to buy the rod? I want to get this going asap.
Thanks again,
Eamon

[Leo Barr]

Eamon I would recommend Chefs knives to go try to start looking herehttp://www.chefknivestogo.com/shac.html
They are very quick to deliver normally 5 days to Spain its a fascinating web site they even have their own forum.
Jende Industries supply quite a lot of the stones.

[Carl Sauer]

Serrated knives are a real challenge. They come in all shapes and sizes with the scallops ranging from large and defined to poorly defined and incredibly tiny. Sometimes even on the same knife! Also knives with serrations do not always have a flat bevel on the non-serrated side. If you can imagine a combination, it must exist somewhere. I can see why coming up with a design for a tool to sharpen all the combinations and permutations of serrated knives is so difficult.

Other than my personal knives, many of the knives I get to sharpen are kitchen knives from friends and from a local church kitchen. The church kitchen knives are donated knives that are low quality or just old knives that have seen better days. I have with the WE, and sometimes brute force help with a belt sander, been able to get some surprisingly good edges on these plain edged knives. Once re-profiled, they are pretty easy to maintain and provide excellent service considering the abuse they take. Just a quick touch up on the WE is all that is needed. I’m very happy with this and so are the people that are using these knives. They never used sharper knives. However, some knives just belong in the trash!

I was so glad to see these videos using the ceramic rod and cardboard to sharpen serrated knives. I tried it (but using Spyderco Ceramic Bench Stones instead of a rod since this is what I had) and got only fair results. And yes I paid attention to the angle. I think the problem is that the going in assumption using this technique is that the knives at one point had reasonably sharp scalloped edges to start with, were not abused and you are just cleaning things up. Not a good assumption with some of the junk I deal with. This I am not happy with but I think the technique is real solid with knives following the going-in assumption. It will be the first thing I try. Is this assumption correct or do I need to further refine my technique?

I thought for the knives this doesn’t work so well on, I would re-profile the larger scallops using the DMT diamond serrated knife sharpener to recut the scallops and then use the technique outlined in the video to maintain them. In theory, this sounds reasonable. Once I get a good edge I should be able to maintain it. No different that re-profiling a plain edge knife and then just touching it up. I am at a loss, however, on how I would deal with the tiny serrations since there may be 30-35 per inch on some knives! The serrations are more rectangular than round and would seem to be too small and the wrong shape for the DMT Tool since it is tapered and conical (I don’t have one yet but planning on ordering a set). I have not found anything on YouTube or the net on how to deal with this. How do you deal with serrations so fine?

This is a hobby for me and I sharpen the knives for free. It is a challenge to take something that has been basically discarded and make it usable again. Yes, I do like getting near mirror edges and being able to split hairs with my high quality folders but this is fun too. I think I have an approach for the larger serrations, but the tiny ones I don’t know. I just don’t want to be just beating my head against a wall trying to fix something that isn’t worth fixing. Do I follow the advice of Tony Horton of P90X exercise fame – “Do your best and forget the rest!”

But I would like to understand my options. I can’t be the first to deal with this problem.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Leo Barr]

Firstly micro serrations are never sharpened what specialist companies do is simple remove and replace them I saw this on You Tube I was looking at industrial type sharpening machines and some do serrations I seem to recall that regardless of size they remove and replace the serrations.
Another alternative and there are a few is the sharpen at a low angle on the back of the serrations it is taking the ceramic rod method a little further go as far as is necessary to pick up on the whole scallop the result will be very sharp although it will not take many sharpenings before the scallops are more or less removed.
The other thing to do is to remove the serrations entirely .
Razor Edge uses grinding disks adapted for the scallop size to re-profile each scallop http://www.razor-edge-knives.com.
I am inclined to remove the scallops once they are wasted and put an ordinary knife profile on them.
I think the most important thing is to weigh up the value of the serrated knife in question many are really cheap – less to replace than the cost of sharpening them especially if individual scallops are sharpened I imagine that to sharpen using a conical file must take around an hour or more on say a ten inch bread knife and the results are often not too good.

[Mikedoh]

On good folding knives such as Benchmade, microtech etc, how do you handle serrations? Would you use this same technique, or something like the conical files. I’m thinking mainly about partially serrated edge knives.

Thanks in advance
Mike

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