Ouuuuuuu.......... That sounds so nice! Just listen real carefully. Oh... Oh... It is effortless. Let's go this way. Alright. So, since my last sharpen tutorial of the Kramer knife a lot of you guys have been asking how do I sharpen a Japanese knife from A to Z. And that's exactly what we're gonna do today now Now I've done many videos on how to sharpen a knife, how to polish a knife how to strop a knife. But I've never done a video where I go from A to Z in one video. So, hopefully this will achieve that for you and you guys will see exactly how I care for my knives....ummm And... Yeah. So, if there's any questions leave them in the comments and I will get to them as soon as I can. So this is a Ryusen. This is actually a demo knife. This is SG2 Ryusen that I've had in my home ummm .. for like... I think it was in my home for about three to four months And I packed it away from as you can see, I'm kind of clearing my garage out, readying for a move. So there's a... You... What you guys are seeing right there? There's like three dozen knives that I will be letting go soon. So, I'll tell you guys more about that later. Okay. So, had to find some paper. Okay. So, the edges still sharp but not very clean. So what we're gonna do? I know you guys missed the brick. I haven't used a brick in so long. So, we're just gonna ruin the edge. Okay... Alright. So, I think that's a good six to eight months of wear on the knife. I had to do it quick. So, I'll actually short on time. So, you can see here knife is not cutting anything. Alright. So, very dull knife. So, this would be a sharpening session for myself, but also a tutorial for you. And I want you guys through exactly what I'm doing. So, let's go. Okay, that's one pass. Okay, that's two pass. Now what I'm doing there if you guys are looking closely I'm spending no more than three strokes. So, it's one, two, three. And I'm inch the knife up. Maybe a half an inch to an inch. One, two, three, and then I inch the knife up. Okay. And the key thing is moving in a more fluid motion. So, I'm stopping and pausing to show you guys. But when I'm doing it more naturally, it's one, two, three and then walk. Till i get to the end. And basically, I do that until I develop a burr on the left side. Now I'm also checking the right side a little bit because I did damage the edge quite a bit on the brick. And I just want to see how the knife is holding up on the right side. Yeah, it's not always necessary, but it's a good thing to do it when you have a very dull knife like what this knife is right now. Okay, we are like one pass away. Now for quick tip... This tip here is in very good condition. But if you had a knife where the tip is either mm..., maybe a minor chip or you need to correct it the tip somehow, I would basically just go on the edge of the stone. Along the edge and the sides for tip work. So, that way you get to where the stone out much more evenly doing it that way. Okay, so wright now you some of you guys may be thinking what is the angle he's sharpening at. I never instruct on angles. If you had to choose an angle, I'm guessing sharpening probably between somewhere between 13 and 15 degrees. Um, the way I find my angles is... I've done in a number of videos, but you guys want to see exactly how. Basically I get my knife onto the stone. You can go at the heel if you want or tip Either way is fine. And dragged my knife from the top of the stone down and leaned the knife into... I leaned the spine into the stone. And the moment where I feel my knife slip I back off a here. That's my sharpening angle. When you feel a slipped, that's basically you being on the shoulder of the knife. You don't want that. Because when you do that, you're... you're making the knife... You're sharpening at a more acute angle. And that could be hard to adjust if you try and do the entire length of the knife that way. So, keeping the knife at closest to the factory edge is gonna be the easiest way for you to sharpen your knife But be trying to change the sharpening angle of the entire cutting edge. And that's a different story and I don't want to talk about that in this... in this video. This is all about finding the easiest angle to sharpen at. And for me in this case... And I didn't do it in the beginning of the video because you can actually do a while you're sharpening and I... I can make really final really micro adjustments during sharpening. You guys will always see that. But once you get the hang of sharpening. It's very easy to do to make these micro adjustments on the fly. So, that's basically what I did and that's how I found my sharpening angle Alright, we'll do one more time. Yeah, we are good. Now we go to the left side. Now the key thing is with this sort of sharpening technique is you don't spend too much time in one section The push and pull is by far the most aggressive of the sharpening techniques, unlike the crescent method where you go from heel to tip and tip to heel, back and forth. Even though it looks aggressive is actually not a very aggressive method. The push and pull... Because often times you're... The weight of the knife and then the weight of your fingers are directly pushing into the stone. I don't recommend that by the way, and I'll explain why in just a second. But what happens is a lot of people push Into the stone and that creates a situation in the long term where you actually will create flat spots in certain sections of the knife. The reason why I don't recommend putting any weight, other than maybe the weight of your hand onto the knife during sharpening, is if you were to accidentally come to the edge of the knife and you didn't walk your fingers and keep your fingers center on the whetstone... And so, if your knife was... Let's say you're sharpening the tip for example. And you didn't walk your fingers and you forgot to just by a half an inch or so. And now your finger is over the corner of the stone. And then you done... You decided to apply some pressure This happens all the time. You will roll your knife over the edge and that will ruin the edge, and you kind of would have to start over So, that's why I don't recommend putting, you know, trying to figure out exactly how many pounds of pressure some people put on their stones. I know there's a couple tutorials out there and people say: "I put between 4 pounds and 6 pounds of weight on my knife during sharpening." I don't recommend that. If you know how to keep your knives perfectly centered and your weight perfectly centered over the stone then, yeah, you can apply a few pounds of pressure and try to keep it that way. But in general people who are starting off Trying to figure out exactly how many pounds of pressure to put on to the stone or on to the blade doing sharpening. It can cause you more headaches than needed. Sprinklers are going off. No, it's the neighbours. Okay. So, we have now developed a burr on the left side of the knife. So, I was sharpening the right side. Now, I'm gonna put the knife over and start the process all over again. That's one pass. Okay, so I'm gonna stop right here. I'm coming in at roughly a 45 degree angle, but you see as I get to the middle of the knife. I start turning the knife to a more perpendicular position to relative to the actual whetstone. So that, I could get to the heel. Without having to worry about scratching the bolster... If you don't do that... There are a number of tutorials I have seen and they actually have kept the same angle all the way here. You can do that if the knife is tall enough. But if the knife is only 47 or 48 millimeters tall, the chances are you will scratch the bolster of your knife. And that's something you do not want, especially on a really nice high, you know, mirror finish bolster like here on the Ryusen. There's something making noise. Man... The things they've awarded my table. Sorry. My feeling for the burr... And... Yeah, I think we are one more pass away. And there's no science to it, folks. There's just all about... It's all about feel. And if you feel like you need to go a little longer - go a little longer. Don't force the burr. It'll take time. This knife was fairly dull as you guys saw. And so yeah, it's gonna take a little bit more time than usual. Again, most of the time my knives are never this dull when it happened on to a sharpening session Okay, so I'm happy with the burr, the micro burr, that's developed... It's very very minor and it's not something you can easily feel. But... But yeah, your burrs shouldn't be very aggressive if they really are... If burrs are very aggressive they can scratch you or can cut you for one. But also means that you may be applying way too much pressure on the whetstone. All your steel is very soft. So generally speaking the harder the steel - the easier they are to develop those micro burrs and they're easier to feel that way as well. So, that's why I actually like to using knives with Rockwell ratings of, you know, 61, 62 and above. Okay. So, from here... The... Let me... Let me just do a demonstration really quickly here. Okay, so the most of the tutorials that are out there, will say, at this point once you develop the bird on both sides, you basically take the knife and pull it along the, you know, the edge grain or really just... just along the edge of a piece of wood or piece of cork. Whatever that may be. That's fine. This is a fine way to deburr. However, I have found that doing it this way you still risk ash... Maybe "reason" is the right word... You still will leave a micro burr. Or the burr is still rolled over on the cutting edge. And then to go from here to the polishing whetstone... I don't find that you get the best edge that way. From here. This is what I actually would do. So, again. This is one way you can do it if you wanted to you can run your knife along a piece of wood or a piece of cork. That works just fine. I use what I call the counting down method and this is basically what it is Let me just show you. You guys will see exactly what I'm talking about. You can actually do a single stroke. You can go from tip to heel if you want to or go from heel to tip. Okay. There's no wrong way of doing it. Anyway you want to is fine. So, for the sake of this video I'm gonna go ten strokes on each side starting from the heel, So you guys can see me doing it from... just from A to Z that way. Okay, so nothing fancy. I don't know how many strokes that was. I think that was close to ten. But you want to hold the relative angle closest to your sharpening angle. And then you go on the other side. And again, you guys know on my videos, I'm terrible at counting. So... So, I'm going up five or a few strokes, it's really not a big deal. So now I'm gonna... So I'm going up to nine and I'm going down to... For the sake of time I'm going down to eight. So, it'll save us a little bit of time. So again, apply no pressure right now. You're allowing the weight of your hands and the weight of the knife to do the work, and the grit of the stone to do the work for you. Okay, so now we go on six. Six on the other side. Okay, so what you will start noticing is if you look really closely onto the whetstone you will see really small metallic flakes that are like, I don't now... Am... They look like little metallic hairs. If you took your hair and chopped off these like one millimeter, two millimeter pieces, you will start seeing that on the whetstone and that's actually a good sign. Don't be afraid of that. You're actually removing the burr directly off of the knife and you're allowing the stone to bring the knife's edge to a really nice and clean apex at this point. So, the burrs normally we're sticking this way in that way. And If you guys were to use the piece of wood and kept it that way there may have been a micro burr sticking it to one side. But doing that, you know, counting down technique We're gonna take all the burrs and align them. Okay, so even though the burr is technically removed or... There's a technical depend on who you ask. There is still a micro burr, but now it's completely standing on the apex of the edge, which is what gives the knife a really nice a sharp edge. So, we're down to four, I guess, four now. So, let's do four. Okay. Okay. Okay, so now I go on two. And what I'll do is I'll go two maybe three to four sets of it. Okay, so now we've gone to one stroke per side. Okay, and again, there's no science to how many strokes you should do per side. I typically would like to do maybe three to four sets per side. Then we're gonna clean the edge up and have a look at how clean the edges right now Where is my rag? So, let's clean off the knife. Okay, so the edge is fairly clean and that's just from the #800 grit stone at this point. Most of the time if you're, you know, short on time, this will be a very acceptable edge to go into the kitchen with. So now we're going to go onto the polishing stone and we're just going to touch up the edge a little bit, make it a little bit cleaner than it is. Think a... None of us watching this video will complain about a nice clean polished edge At this point if you really wanted to to be... If you wanted to sharpen on a budget you can simply go from here onto the strop and you're done. But again, we're doing a full sharpening, polishing and strop session in this video. So, that's what we're gonna do. Okay. So here's the question that a lot of people are confuse about. Or not the question, the step that a lot of people are confused about Am... Practically every single tutorial I have seen on YouTube am... will... I would say I get this wrong... Will do it this way. They recommend or they. I will see them go here. And they will basically do the entire sharpening process all over again. And there's nothing wrong with that. The only reason why I don't recommend that is because you've already developed your burr, your clean. Your edge is super clean at this point. Your... There is no burr. The burr is standing completely straight on its end at this point. And if you were to do the entire polishing process all over it again you will basically more or less recreate the burr on one side and then the other. And then do the counting down method all over again There's nothing wrong with that. That's perfectly fine. The only reason why I don't recommend doing it that way is... Especially for people who are new to sharpening... At this point If you were to do it all over again One you have to find the exact or relatively the exact same angle at which you sharpen the knife at. And if you don't know how to, you know, find that angle efficiently enough on the polishing whetstone, you may find it pretty tough to get a really nice clean edge at this point. So, what I recommend is going straight instead of doing the push-n-pull all over again on the polishing whetstone. You go and do the single stroke method. Now the reason why I recommend doing it this way is because you've just finished doing the single stroke method on the sharpening stone, you're going to have some muscle memory at this point. And it should be much easier for you to find that relative same angle on the polishing whetstone. And you don't have to go with the counting down method either, you basically just go one stroke. per side. Now there's no exact method, or actually there's no exact science to say how many strokes you should do on the polishing stone. I generally like to do about 10 to 12 sets of pulls. Am... The better way is actually look at the stone... What you can do is do, you know, a dozen strokes per side. Clean the stone off. I know a lot of people who are knife sharpening aficionados, say this is completely wrong. But, just trust me for a second, clean the stone off. Okay. Now do a couple of strokes, and now look at the stone. Is the knife leaving the same amount of marks, gray marks, as the first dozen sets. if it is you're not quite done yet. So I'm going to do maybe four or five strokes. Okay. So, I'm gonna show you... Look right here. You can see that there is very little load up on the whetstone at this point. That tells me that the edge is becoming much cleaner than it was, you know, 12-15 strokes ago. So, at this point I can stop if I want to or I can keep on going. And so, I can test it again. I can clean the stone off. Okay. So, there is virtually no markings left over by the knife at this point. There's very very minor gray, you know, kind of... If you were to run a chalk along the edge of a board that's basically what you're seeing. So to me this knife is ready. The edge is ready to go onto the strop. And that's exactly what I'm gonna do right now. Okay, so I'm not gonna worry too much about wiping it off. Oops. I was testing some stropping compounds recently. So, this has got two types of compounds in it. They're both #14000 grit diamond compounds, but they have different ratios of water in them. So... So, this side, you can see right here, really easy. It's heavier here. Yeah, so... Yeah. Anyways, it shouldn't ruin. It shouldn't be a problem all kind of trying to even them out at this point. I know it's kind of unorthodox. I'm sorry guys. I'm not the most organized knife sharpener out there. And there's still water on the... On the strop. Okay, so Enjoy the knife off. It's okay if there's a little bit of water on the knife when you're stropping. It won't damage anything. Good quality leather should not be that affected by a little bit of water. Not a big deal. Okay, so we're gonna stop just like we did on the whetstones but instead of, you know, pulling forward edge leading. We're gonna go edge trailing. Okay, so we can go from heel to tip. Heel to tip. Or you can go from heel to tip on one side and tip to heel on the other. Whatever is easiest for you. The most important thing is just keeping that consistent angle. You can even hold the edge the strop up and just, you know, run it this way if you want to. All right. So... let's see how we did. Uuu... That sounds so nice. Just listen real carefully. Oh... It is effortless. Okay, let's go... Let's go this way. Oh... Yeah, so it's fairly sharp, I will say. But that's basically all I've got. That's all I did. I've got my dull knife, I've got my sharpening stone, my polishing stone and a my strop. And so, the key thing to remember is if you guys are going from the sharpening to the olishing don't start the entire process all... all over again. Just go straight from the same motion that you left off of the previous whetstone. And so, the other question you guys might have is... If you guys went from the #3000 that... Yeah, this is the Naniwa Pro "Ryky Edition" #3000/800. If there was another whetstone after this one, say you would have go on to #8000 whetstone or #12000 grit whetstone. Do the exact same thing. Don't start the entire push-n-pull process all over again. Go straight from this the single stroke method on this stone to the next stone single stroke method as well. And then after that just do single edge pulls on the strop. And your knife should be golden. So, key point is when deburring the knife deburr on the sharpening stone, but don't deburr... Well at least my method is I don't deburr on a piece of wood. I do all of the deburring on the whetstone. That to me has given the most consistent edge that I have ever gotten on, you know, with hand sharpening. Everyone's methods different. That's fine. This is just something I've developed and learned on my own. and it has worked well for me. Am... You know, if you guys have any questions with sharpening in general leave them in the comments. But that's exactly how I sharpen my knives from A to Z, from sharpening, polishing to stropping. Just listen to this edge. Oh! It's so clean. Oh, that's the wet spot right there. I can't cut through the water. Oh. So nice. Now, I will not run the fingers on the edge, okay that will a... That will be stupid on my part Am, but yeah! I hope you guys enjoyed that tutorial. That was kind of a, you know, sharpening session for me. That's basically how I sharpen my knives. That is literally from A to Z. There's nothing I do beyond that above that. You are seeing me sharpen my own personal knife and you know... I don't do any... I don't do it any differently for my tutorials except to talk a lot more. So... But in terms of my personal knives for my kitchen, these are the stones that are used... that I use and plus my strop. And at this point I basically use this strop once a week in my home. And that's all I do for my knives until they actually require sharpening from a chip or dent on the cutting edge. But other than that I strop once a week and then I sharpen on my whetstones once every other month. That keeps my knives very sharp. Okay, so as you guys may know I've talked about getting a larger space for me to work from. I don't know how long... I think I told you guys maybe a month and month and a half ago about it. It's been going on for quite some time. But I'm getting to the point right now. And my... my channels growth where I'm kind of growing my garage. This is a two-car garage. So, it's a... it's an 18 feet by 18 feet. And i've got just a stuff everywhere in my garage. It looks horrible. It has worked well enough for the... for the time being. But, I'm of grown this space. And so I have... For the last few months I've been looking at, you know, warehouse space, commercial space to move into. And I have found two or three that I really like So, as of today, today's Friday, and you guys probably have seen this video on Saturday. I have put in an offer a formal offer for a spot for a 1000 square foot spot like a few minutes away. And so, It's gonna take a few days for them to review the offer and get back to me. I'll know by next week whether they accept the offer or not. And if they accept the offer I should be in a... I should be signing it at least for June first. Then I'll be in... I'll hopefully be moving in there. It will take me a few days to move in and set up. If they... don't accept the offer then we go to space number two. Am... So that's what's happening there. In the meantime my... I'm cleaning up the garage here, basically putting everything in boxes and all that good stuff. The knives on my wall... So, half of the knives on my wall were artisan one more... one off's that I have purchased from my trips in Japan And the other half were just knives I have collected over the years. So, the knives I can repurchase I'm just gonna sell because I don't want to carry... you know, more knives to the new space. I just want to let them alone. I want to move as few things as possible So, all of the knives that I'm... Basically all of the knives I'm not keeping I'm gonna be... selling on eBay for a $1 starting bid and no reserve. So, all the knives, basically I have about three dozen knives sitting right next to me right here that are gonna be going off for eBay to my Patreon in about a week or so. So, From the time you guys seen this video from May... From... What is it? We're in May, right? So yeah, so June first. On June first also auctioning all my knives off on eBay for the starting price of $1 and no reserve. And that will be about three dozen knives that I'll be letting go. And then all my camera gear my... I'm switching over... I'm switching... I'm switching to new camera gear and lighting equipment in the new space. Am, so my current GH5, Atomos display monitor, my... my microphones, F4 recoderer, my entire filming equipment, all of my filming equipment that you guys have been watching me, you know, record all my videos on for the last two years, you know, one and a half two years are all gonna be up for grabs as well. So, Am, I'm not sure about auction those off, you know, one by one I don't really want to because I don't have time to kind of pack and ship a bunch of things. So, i might just do a $1 auction, starting auction, for all of my video equipment. So, camera, monitor, audio microphones and... For any aspiring youtubers out there this may be the chance for you to get some really good equipment for not a whole lot of money That's probably what I'm gonna do and then all the knives will be auctioned off one at a time. You know, it's just real briefly looking at what I've got. I probably got four, maybe... yeah, maybe $4,000 $5,000 of video equipment that I'm using right now. Yeah, so I'm excited for what's happening There's been just so many really cool things that are happening in my life, regarding my channel and just my personal life as well. And I've just... I'm so blessed. And I just want to say thank you every one of you guys for helping me make this dream come true and helping me realize this dream. And I just cannot thank you guys enough for that Well, you know, I'm actually kind of curious. Let's do something really quickly here. Let's do a quick... Am... Let's do a quick test on the PT50A. So, for those who are serious what this is, this is just basically a really fancy and accurate scale, that will measure by the gram, at least this model does, measures to the gram, exactly how much force it took to cut a filament that is placed on the top of the scale. So, it's a... It's a fun toy to have. It's not gonna help you sharpen knives any better. But it will show you at the cutting edge how sharp your knife is. Am, also keep in mind this doesn't actually help you determine how good a knife will cut as well. It's sharpness and as geo... or blade geometry are two separate things This is only showing you how sharp the knife is. Okay, so we're now it's set... should be set at zero and let's do it the real cut quickly here. All right, so... Oh, 200! Check this out! Exactly... Can you see that? This is my fault. 200! Alright. So, what does that mean? So that's 200 grams. And according to the chart they have... So, 200 is what a utility razor blade is... I guess that's what most utility razor blades come out of the box. So, it's razor sharp. It's good. And then below that this is 100 which is a double edge razor blade, which is like I guess what you use for shaving. So, this is razor sharp. Not bad for 50 minutes, you know, on the whetstones and then on a strop With a lot of talking to you guys as well. So... Edge is fairly clean. I'm happy with that. I always like to be in the 100 range, but at 200... I'm... I'm happy with that. I think that knife is fairly sharp. And you guys heard how clean it was cutting paper. So... But yeah! That's it. Okay? So... This is called a PT50A for those who are curious. I will leave a link to it in the video description. And I'll link all the... everything else in the video's description as well. Okay, guys! Well, thank you for your time. And I will catch you in the next video.
