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A Guide To Sharpening Stones
Anyone with an interest in cooking or using sharp edged knives and cleavers for other purposes needs to understand one basic truth: they eventually get dull. To combat this, one needs to understand sharpening stones in order to make their investment in bladed utensils and tools last or be prepared for frequent replacement cycles.
The first thing to look at when considering a sharpening stone is the sharpening angle. Almost all common blades have some type of bevel design, or sloping area where the edge of the blade meets the body of the tool. Not all cutting tools use the same bevel angle because different cutting tasks require different bevel angles. For example: filleting knives have very shallow bevel angles, typically between five and ten degrees. This is vastly different than cleavers which may be called on to cut through bone and sinew, and thus have bevel angles between fifteen and twenty-five degrees.
On the subject of coarse stones versus smooth stones, it is important to understand that fine blades need fine stones, while blades that could stand to have a micro-serrated edge should be finished with a coarse sharpening stone. The degree of coarseness possessed by sharpening stones is referred to as grit. The problem with grit is that there are many different systems of measurement in place, and some of them are only used for certain products. For example: Japanese water-stones are graded on a completely different grit scale than diamond stones.
Remember to sharpen both sides whenever using a sharpening stone, or a burr might be formed. A burr is a small, potentially microscopic, lip of metal that can break off and become embedded in the food or whatever else is being cut. Obviously there are plenty of times when this can be unhealthy and potentially disastrous.
Sharpening stones need to be periodically lubricated to keep their pores from filling with metal shavings. This is where the age-old debate between water and oil comes into play.
Oil based lubricants supposedly help remove metal shavings created during the sharpening process from pores. This is referred to as ‘floating’ and is considered to be very important because metal shavings do nothing to help the sharpening process, and may actually cause the sharpening process to produce results akin to that of using a very coarse stone.
On the water side of the argument, simply washing a stone may be enough to achieve the same effect with nothing more than a damp cloth. Proponents of water-based cleaning suggest that fewer metal filings stay in sharpening stones when compared to lubricant based sharpening processes, and thus there is less chance of microscopic amounts of metal entering food that is being cut via microscopic metal particles finding their way back onto the knife or cleaver.
Whatever theory one subscribes to in regards to removing metal shavings from a sharpening stone, it is important to use sharpening stones consistently. Creating a single sharp edge that runs the length of the blade is an important and often time consuming chore but it has the potential extend the service life of the blade significantly.
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