Knife sharpening tools and gadgets: which one to use?

So you'll need to keep your knife edge sharp between Blade & Butler knife sharpening servicing and there are many devices and tools on the market to help keep them sharp.

Here we'll give them a brief run down and add our opinions.

The sharpening steel.

The most common and recommended tool to keep your knife edge in line and thinned down.

There are two basic kinds and both will keep your knife sharp if used correctly.

You can view a great youtube tutorial here - TUTORIAL

The first is the diamond steel.

Used mainly for honing or finishing the knife.

This is a rod of super fine aluminium oxide / synthetic diamond coated steel.

It acts like a super fine sand paper and re aligns the edge of your knife.

Perfect for maintaining an edge between Blade & Butler servicing.

The second is the sharpening steel or a "butcher's" steel.

This is a steel rod with fine grooves cut into it in straight or spiral patterns ( or both ) and comes in a variety of coarseness and cuts. This acts like a file on your knife edge.

The rougher the cut - the more abrasive the sharpen and the more steel that is removed from your knife edge.

We like to start on a spiral cut rough steel and finish on a super smooth diamond steel for best results. You can even go further and finish up on a leather strop and then newspaper to be a real knife geek.

The whet stone.

The oldest method of sharpening a knife that goes way back to the iron age.

Modern whet stones usually come in two grits. A course grit for faster stock removal and a finer grit on the reverse side for finishing.

To be honest, the technique is extremely difficult to perfect and takes a long time to learn and to perform on each knife. By all means give it a go, but learn on a cheap low value knife as you can seriously ruin a knife whilst learning.

Here's a great tutorial on - YOUTUBE

A pull through device.

There are many pull through style devices available and whilst cheap and seemingly effective at first, they ultimately blunt your knife quicker than using a conventional sharpening steel. We see many knives coming to us with 'pull through' scars on the blade and always find the cutting edge to be extremely blunt and excessively thick.

We would not ideally recommend long term use of these devices.