Here's how I ride myself of a wire edge that's seems to always be there when sharpening a knife with a any type of gadget that only does a side at a time: take your knife and do a couple strokes on the stone or with it on the wire-edge side, this will take off abit of it, but it will also push it on to the other side, so repeat this process on the other side and each time you'll have to use a less number of knife strokes on the stone. After several times it will be gone. With a softer steel or titanium, this edge will form much faster as more of the softer metal will be removed with each pass of the sharpening devise. As stated by hephaestus, a sharpener with a V-design will take care (should still be watched as simply running ones finger from the backbone (I dont know the correct term
) of the knifes blade in a perpendicular motion in relation to the blade down across the cutting edge (or along it, personal preference) one can feel if a wire edge was formed or not.
Concerning the blade composition: in order to make a blade hard it must have or does have a higher cardon content than a softer blade. Also this can be reached by heating the blade to a red color and then quenching in the proper solution (water, oil, some steels air-harden, alloyed powders can be dumped onto the steel while hot to give a case hardening effect, etc) and this doesn't allow the molecules of the material to line up with each other as they'd like and also trapping any of the carbon molecules thus making the metal harder. On the contrary, if the metal was allowed to cool slowly would escape making the steel softer.
Now to talk about stainless steels a bit or the stainless properties of steels or at least the little I know: the more properties (stainless) a steel has the less carbon it is going to contain. It is a game of picking a material that suits ones need (am I needing a tool that must cut a lot but also is around H2O or do I need a tool that really doesn't need to cut much but is around H2O or salt H2O a lot. If I were to give advise on buying a knife for a specific purpose go talk to you local welding/fadrication shop; they'll most likely know more than youll care to hear, they even make nifty pocket-manuals comparing steels and sometimes one can find them that compare only steels used for tools and such.
After figuring some of this out it is knida neat to see how good of a steel or bad some of these companies use.
I have probably written way too much and in reality most people will lose a knife before it wears out (at least me
) or buy the knife in how it feeling in ones hand which is more important, for the most part, than all I've listed above as with a little bit of care (such as the auto-grease, washing it off in fresh H2O, and sllowing it to dry outside the sheath) a junk knife will last longer than most likely needed.
Hope this helps if not it will give you something to think about, and if anyhtingI've said was backwards correct me as I get confused every now and then......:duh
Until next time,
Justin
