Thread: work sharp knife sharpener

Originally Posted by Nick-D

Yeah, interestingly most of the professional steels are comparitively pretty soft.
The flip side of a tough steel keeping an edge for a long time is it will also take a long time to rrsharpen that edge.

The meat worker edges are kept pretty toothy and course, hollow gind helps too.

I think much of being able to work an entire animal without touching up a knife comes down to technique, not scraping the egde along bone or cutting hairs etc will keep a knife sharp for ages.

Smae as having a decent cutting board at home and hand cleaning your knives. It's often not the actual cutting that dulls the knife but the hitting of hard things on the other side of what you are cutting.

I find that the hard steels used in some of the knives sold to hunters will not cut as well as professional butchery knives because the blades are too wide to get a correctly shaped edge. Because of the hardness those blades will chip if they are not wide. They might be sharp but they have an contour like a firewood splitting wedge and that makes them slow and tiring to use because they 'drag' in the work.

Totally agree re technique and boards. I would add that the shape of the blade makes a big difference to how well the knife works, meaning fewer cuts for the same job, which opens the debate as to what is the best knife blade shape ??