How to Sharpen Kitchen Knives

I promise I've had these kitchen knives for about 15 years now and I've never been able to get them properly sharp until now so if you want to get your permanently frustratingly blunt kitchen knives into a razor-sharp state keep watching [Applause] now I thought I made this video today because I'm constantly amazed that in spite of the fact that we've all got knives there seems to be no obvious go-to solution for getting a really sharp finish on them over the years I've struggled away with knife sharpeners like this I've tried sharpening steels and more recently I bought one of these on eBay 15 quid on eBay which is a Chinese knockoff of the edge Pro sharpening system and none of these sharpening systems have been successful you look on the internet and there's a perplexing array of manual and electric sharpening systems the manual ones are invariably cheap and just rubbish and the electric ones promise so much we've all seen those gimmicky videos on Facebook where you get a little bucket of metal shavings as the sharpener sharpens the blade but the problem with the electric sharpening systems is you have no control over what's happening to your cherished expensive knives and the mass of Chris's modern is they remove far too much of the blade so after doing a load of research I came to the conclusion that to get a truly sharp knife you've basically got to sharpen it yourself and I settle upon this controlled sharpening system from Lansky I found a couple online called knives and tools I co-taught UK who seemed really knowledgeable in this field had a great selection of products and I wanted don't I wanted to check with them that I was buying the right thing now if you were thinking I don't want to use one of these controlled sharpening systems is for the pros only too much hassle I'll never get the right finish don't click away just yet because this is the first time I've ever used this system and you've seen from the start of this video just how ridiculously sharp I got that knife so bear with me yes it's not as convenient as an electric system you just pull your knife through but with something like this you get so much more control and you'll end up with a far sharper knife than you'd ever get from one of these manual or electric chopping systems there's a few things already liked about this Lance kit kit when it arrives a lot of fact that it comes in its own case which is easy just to stow in the draw when you're finished using it I like the fact that it comes with a full set of instructions upon sharpen your knives which is something that the rooks impro that I bought on eBay didn't know you do flea people on the internet sometimes just holding these things in their hands and sharpening knives with them I would recommend that to use a kit you really need one of these two mounts now I bought both of these mounts because I wanted to find out for you guys which one I thought was the best so you've got this Universal mount here so the idea is you assemble the mount like that and then you place your knife sharpener onto the mount and then you've got one of two options you can either screw it down to a bit of wood but for me I think that option is most appropriate if you're going to use the mount in a workshop way to screwing it down through a counter because you don't really want to be carpeting around the mount on a piece of wood in and out of the kitchen if I make this job as easy as possible the other option is you could get a clamp like these Axminster clamps and bought these clamps the other day and I'm quickly falling in love with them because there's so many uses for them so you could your map them down like that and then that's ready to go but to my mind if you're going to go through all the effort you might as well dispense with this mount and buy this one the super C clamp mount now the great thing about this man it's got two fixing points so you can mount your knife sharpener on a horizontal surface like this or on a vertical surface like that if you're shopping your knives in your kitchen you may society wanted to clown them to work top or something like that so I think this is by far the best of the two the downside is it doesn't fit in the case about the other mount but it's certainly small so don't as a real issue I'm just gonna put a little bit of insulating tape underneath the mount just to protect the work surface doesn't really matter to me because this is granite but in your case if you've got words or Corian or something you know what ratchet down there as well so then you just position the tiny clamp on top of the c-clamp so you're looking at the rest of the kit now we've got four grades of diamond stone I read with a Lansky diamond kit because the cheap eBay kit I've got really I was really disappointed with how quickly the stones degraded this basically happens sharpening one knife and you can see there just how much of the stone was whittled away so got my diamond kids here they range from extremely coarse cut that coarse medium and fine there's two things we like about as kids whereas the cheap get up or on ebay had the grade of the stones written on the stainless surface with ridiculous because obviously when you start sharpening your knife the the writing came off with these stands it's actually obviously written on the back which is a nice touch the other thing I'm like isn't to clean these things because they're diamond stones but can simply clean them with some soapy water and no toothbrush bizarrely they give you a bottle of honing oil which is completely irrelevant to this kit so they understand what that's doing that so let's get started so I'm going to turn a little guide rods out of the case unscrew the wing screw on hoe in itself and then simply slot the guide rod into the hone and then tighten up the screw now go do this on the other three [Music] now southern instructions that if your guide rod once you've done this isn't completely level you can just take it and just bend it a bit so that it's sitting completely flat on the surface like that one is now now the structure is going to quite a lot detail about how to fix a knife into the clamp it's worth going through this the first time you do it but basically all you're trying to do is to get a triangular-shaped gap on the clamp as you can see here to mirror this sort of triangular shape of your knife blade and in fact once you set up the first knife it's really very straightforward to put the next knife then you literally loosen the screw at the front fix your knife into position the next knife into position and then just tighten it up so really it couldn't be more straightforward so a couple of last very quick points generally speaking you want about five eighths of the knife blade projecting out the front of the clan which for this particular knife is about twelve and a half mil if you've got a blade that's under half an inch wide you literally just fix it in the little notches of the front of the clamp like that and the last point to make is that you want the knife sort of as reasonably central in the clamp because that helps you with the honing obviously if you've got much longer knife you'll have to position it and then keep moving it along as you're honing so so with me let's get started first of all I'm gonna do the age-old test you always see on these knife sharpening videos I'm going to try a sharp cut a piece of paper with this knife it's not very convincing is it pretty blunt blade quick test on my horrible hairy arm and again it's nothing happening there now you see here we've got four guide slots on the clamp itself depending on what you're using the knife for you've got four different angles seventeen twenty twenty-five and thirty degrees we're going to go for the 20 degree angle here which is commonly used angle for high quantity blades excellent edge for kitchen cutlery and slicing knives I'm starting with the extra coarse diamond so after all that boring theory this really is fun easy bit insert the diamond into the guide so I'm starting the base a knife I'm just pushing the hone against the base like this see you see some people doing that that's not recommended instructions say you always sharpen into the blade working in this sort of two inch sections really see what this is doing to the blade already the tip I find using sharpening stones generally rather than these fixed angle ones the tip it's the hardest area to get any sort of a blade on but you can really see how the home is already refining that tip I see a lot of people saying you want to do this six to ten times but my blade is so badly sharpened over the years that I'm going to do this for a bit longer than that to concentrate on redefining the angle of this knife that's been so far be sharpened for so long now you're gonna see the next great feature of this clown where through my old life sharpen it if I wants to sharpen the other side of the knife I then have to take it out of the clamp turn it over and take the whole thing back up again which was a massive pain all I have to do with this is literally turn it over and put it back on the clamp again back into the guide and that off we go again [Music] now they say that if whilst you're doing this the home begins to leave very smoothly across the night this means the stone is clogged with metal shavings so again for this diamond home oh we did you get the soap and water with an old toothbrush and we just give it a bit of a brush down if you do this make sure before you put the hoenn away that you give it a really good dry so I think they can go rust if you don't dry them properly now the other thing as you're going on you might find when I first started doing this my knife was moving around a bit in the cloud so what I've done is I've just reduced the angle of the clamp I must have set it up slightly wrong and now it's incredibly firm I go from the extra course I'm not going to move to the course home and do exactly the same thing again what this guide is doing is it's keeping the angle of the home consistent on each sharpen so you end up with a nice consistent angle for the blade I've got to tell you guys I'm no pro expert knife sharpener you see a lot of these videos on YouTube from hunting outdoor specialists we're using this for their hunting knives I'm appealing to you guys to help show you how to do your kitchen knives point one and point two I want to show you that even somebody like me who's never used this kit before can achieve a really professional finish because that is likely to be what puts you off buying this could you'll think wow you know this guy's a professional outdoor adventurer or whatever he's sharpening knives all his life I like what he's doing but I'm never gonna buy one of these not going to get the same results well let me tell you this this is literally the first time I've ever started using this home right I know whether you can see that but this is starting to look quite impressive I'm getting quite excited about the results of this experiment and now I'm going moving from the course to the medium diamund you got starting from the base working in sort of two inch runs I'm just putting a reasonable amount of pressure on a lot fun of sharpen it there too much pressure I'm almost just letting the diamonds do the work I got a tip of that blade now that had a really dull edge on it before and it's already starting to look like it's got a professional finish again swapping it over love how easy it is to do that on this knife sharpener [Music] says you should always work from the base forward I find when you get the tip it's actually quite difficult to move it that way which probably meant to do so I mean out again you've got to break the rules and me so I'm just going the opposite way on the tip there now file it onto the file about the piano playing in the background I think that's my daughter passing upstairs it's okay oh this is lovely now on to the fine I can really feel the difference with this phones it's like it's doing the final refinements of the blade once your knives are properly honed the first time our using this you see a lot of people on the internet suggesting you just do this six to ten times on each side so yeah don't forget this might look quite convoluted long winter what I'm doing today but once you've done this on all your knives once next time you just need to go one two three four five six one two three four five six and then you'll be able to just turn it over and do the same thing on the back so it's probably going to take you 15 20 minutes to do your entire collection of knives I'm doing a lot more because this is the first time these nights I've ever had a proper sharpen might just give that bit of a clean being the fine hone it's likely to get more clogged more quickly than the more coarse ones listen to that noise now that sounds like we're really on the finishing straighten out with via with this home okay we've finished this stage of the process you can see there the new blade 20 degree angle blade that we've created now let's try the paper test that's pretty impressive isn't it but we're gonna go one step further now when I was talking to knives and tools about buying this product and checking with them that they're greater meals or I want to buy the guys on the phone said have you heard of stropping I was thinking well no I haven't done it anything about that and so they recommended I buy strop and they sent me this pocket strop these drops have leather on the Front's in the back if you want to get a really really sharp finish to your knife when you finish sharpening as I've just done even though you can't really feel them there will be microscopic girl there girls microscopic burners left on the knife edge and what these leather straps do is they remove or a line those burrs now you don't just use the leather on its own you apply either a strop and compound again I've got to hit from knives and tools I've got the fine one here and the course or you can get diamond spray compound in a bottle most of the enthusiasts are there used the diamond spray but whereas that sort of forty nine pounds for a little spray bottle these dropping compounds are only six pounds a pack so as I'm a bit of an amateur at this I thought I'd stop these given the price difference and we get on so what you have to do you have to coat your strop with the compound now I thought this is great this is called a pocket strop it's good if you stop traveling if you're out and about in the outback in the wild and you want something in your backpack just to increase the sharpness of your blades if they get blown while you're working but for us guys and kitchens I wanted something that was a bit bigger than this so yesterday I set about making my own paddle strop now you can see here on the video how I set about making that this paddle straw there about 43 to 50 pounds on the internet so it's quite pricey a piece of kit which is basically the reason I decided to make my own out of a piece of 3x1 timber which is dead easy to do you don't have to put this put this shaped handle on like I did you can just literally get a plank of wood but a piece of leather on some people even use their old belts they're all no the belts for this but I've got a great friend from a day job who runs a company making bespoke furniture in leather cowhide with a metal he does stair rails and he's also featured on George Clark's amazing spaces for a ridiculously amazing took that he converted into a Motorhome I phoned him up and said have you got any leather lying about that you don't need and no makers like David tend to have quite a lot of surface leather so you kindly sent me I cut up hide which I used to make this drop what I would say to you is if you think about making one of these and look in your area see if you can find any fabricators that use leather they're bound to have some surplus leather that they would be able to either give you or sell you buy cheaply ok so let's move on and I'll show you how to get one of these paddles drops loaded with the compound again this is the first time we've done this so for all those struggling and giri's out there go easy on me so anyway they recommend you warm the leather and the strop and compound before you apply it to the strop I've got an airgun here that he used for pain of stripping but how driver to exact the same job now I'm just going to coat it onto the leather now that because I've warm that up that's actually going on really easily I went a little bit of heat of the the compound a little bit too much I've got a little bit of excess that's not actually going on pretty easily just want to put a nice fine even layer of the compound onto the leather strop [Applause] I'm just wondering why whether the course compound didn't go on as well because actually for the course compound you need the rough side of the leather I'm just going to try that now [Laughter] yeah that did actually go a bit easier I can see why people prefer the diamond compound spray so anyway now I've got my paddles drop with the fine and the coarse and I was gonna take my knife trying to keep the same angle as I was adopting before and I'm just very lightly stroking the knife across the strop now I'm going to use the fine side of the pedal strop so much easier to do this on one side of the blade and the other being right-handed that is much easier motion for me than that is I just want to be doing that left-handed yeah that works better you have to be a bit careful when you're stopping because from what I've seen it is a bit like sharpening well you are still sharpening the blade so you don't want to undo the good work you've done with your initial sharpening on the lansky right that is not feeling very sharp indeed so we're pretty much done let's just see how it works in practice so paper test whoa check that out guys that is incredible and literally this is the first time I've ever sharpened a knife properly like this before I go we've got one more test to do you see a lot of people seeing if they can shave the hairs on their arms and say here we go I'm sure you don't want to see my hairy arm but it's worth doing this because this is the true test of whether this knife is now completely sharp look at that guys this is basically razor hahaha I'm not going to do too much cuz I want to retain some of that out of my arm but look at that absolutely smooth as you like over the hairs gone so for those of you who've got this far thank you for sitting through what has been a bit of a long video so how do we summarize i've been massively impressed with the lansky system somebody who's never sharpened a knife using this system before and achieved a razor-sharp edge I think it speaks for itself if I have one criticism and this is an inevitable criticism of a system like this the knife featured in today's video was quite short knife on a longer carving knife like this which I did a little bit later on the day I did struggle a bit partly because the blade was so knackered after all the years of abuse that it's had but also because it long you need to reset the sharpening system at three different points really on the blade you could get away with two to make sure that you get the controlled angle right there way across the length of the blade so that is a bit of a pain but you know it's worth investing the time to do it if you want to get really sharp knife I suppose the other downside of this system just over a hundred pounds for the sharpening system itself for the diamond shopping system they do do a cheap a non diamond system but it just over a hundred pounds for this system and the clamp that featured in today's video obviously it's not cheap but I would say to you it is an investment for the future the knives that you bought are probably very expensive anyway so you don't want to be using one of these cheap manual or electric sharpening systems you can get on the market which are invariably designed for cheaper grade steel knives anyway you don't want to be using those systems on your expensive knives it's having watched today's video you still think well actually it's not for me it's too much hassle there is a chef's choice sharpening system that I found this morning on the internet when I was doing a bit of last-minute research now that is also not cheap 149 pounds but in comparison to some of the other electric sharpening systems what I've seen it doesn't least give you the ability to sharpen at different angles and it has a honing stropping stone as well but I would say to you give this system ago because with practice you're only gonna get more and more skillful at using it when you re honed all your knives once it's going to be much easier next time because you can simply apply the medium or the fine hone to get your knives back up for sharpness you may or may not decide to bother with a stropping pedal like this the lansky system produces such a good edge if you think that this is just going a little bit too far you can get away without it so that's it I really hope you found today's video useful as ever links to the sharpening system and all the other tools that I've referred to in today's video are in the description at the end of the video please click on the like button if you've enjoyed this video and if you're new to my channel I'd love to have you subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 1,003,526

Rating: 4.4758968 out of 5

Keywords: how to sharpen kitchen knives, lansky, controlled angle sharpening system, diamond deluxe, razon sharp knives, charlie diyte, skerper stropping compound, skerper pocket strop, skerper paddle strop, stropping

Id: FAOC-0Le8EE

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2018