How to Sharpen A Knife Like Bob Kramer

oh yeah oh yeah push cut that nice clean edge don't you think if you guys don't enjoy his lengthy tutorials go ahead and turn the computer off or you know hit the close button go watch something else but this is gonna be a full-blown tutorial I'm gonna take my time on every step I'm like a skip nyan thing so this is getting back to perfection basics this is the classic you know stay-at-home dad in his garage for five to seven hours a day sharpening knives all right so a lot of you guys have been asking for a sharpening tutorial and if it's 20/20 you want to kick it off with of how to sharpen or how to master Bob Kramer's sharpening technique now I'm not really sure if Bob Kramer created this technique pretty sure he didn't but every single request I get for this sort of sharpening style they always refer to the Bob Kramer video that he made for I want to say sir let's hob and since then has been really uploaded by you know every major retailer in the country and I think collectively it's gotten over like 10 million views now I have seen the video and it's a very impressive video you know in five or six minutes he got a knife to be very sharp but that video was heavily edited and it is Bob Kramer after all you know but one thing I noticed in that video even though he shows you his mastery of him sharpening it really doesn't show you how to sharpen or doesn't break down these steps of how to get your knife into that sort of form so by the end of this video I hope that you understand the mechanics of this sharpening technique and so what I'm going to do is I'll break it down to you into two maybe even three separate steps two main steps and at the end of the video I'll show you guys a pro tip of how to really get a nice sharp tip for not just this knife but all of your knives now keep in mind are normally sharpen my knives on a water bin set up with the sharpening bridge but for this video I want to just take all the distractions out of the way and hopefully that'll make it easier for you guys to focus on the sharpen technique versus all the equipment I may have set up in my personal sharpening setup so for those who are curious I'm using the sterics 1000 for my sharpening stone I got a rusty razor here in case the stone gets too dirty and then for a polishing stone I have the Rica 5000 we're just soaking right now as we speak so first thing is the grip for a normal push and pull setup I always suggest getting a good basic grip setup which is bringing the middle finger up to the toil of knife or the neck of the knife and then bringing your index finger over to the spine and then laying your thumb down by the heel this grip here gives you a really nice grip for optimal control of your knife when you need to change really my new angles while sharpening however because this chopping technique requires a lot of movement this grip may be a bit inhibiting for some people especially for a knife that has a nice girthy handle I do recommend try and get this grip if you have large hands but for those who have slightly smaller hands like myself there's nothing wrong with just altering your grip a little bit in that case if you have this very knife here and you can't get this grip nice and comfortable what you can do is simply get your middle finger up to the toy again and just get a nice pinch strip going on now this grip here will give you enough control for sharpening if it's good enough for you to cook with it's good enough for sharpening so one thing I want to talk about is when to choose this sharpening technique you can see here that the lower I would say the lower I would say one third of this knife is fairly flat and then you have a nice curvature leading all the way up to the tip of this knife so very consistent belly and then you have a nice flat spot or a relatively flat spot towards the 1/3 latter half of the knife so this specific technique works really well for knives with this sort of profile or a German knife that has a nice you know run a profile from the tip all the way to the heel I wouldn't recommend this technique for knives that are more traditional Japanese style knives where they have a much longer flat spot on their knives and then a short belly like so we got one of my knives here this is my meer my custom made knife and it's got more of a Sabatier profile it really wouldn't work that well with this sort of sharpening technique every knife profile is different there's not going to be one knife sharpening technique that will universally they apply to all knives so just keep that in mind so the next thing is grinding angle now if you watched Bach Kramer's video he tells you he I think what did he put a couple quarters or so under the knife that's fine there's nothing wrong with that the way this technique works is it's very simple you basically find an angle that's roughly let's say 15 degrees or so you whatever angle you want to start at and so as you're pulling in one direction or the other you lean the spine into the whetstone and once you feel a slip you back off a hair that is a sharpening angle so now we're going to get into the actual sharpening and when it's in so now I've got a package I don't know what it is but I think there are knives in here we'll find out later okay where was I [Music] okay so breaking the steps down okay I got it now if you watch this technique you see everything move in one single motion okay and you know it's a very sexy technique it's you know very fluid looking but I wanna break it down into two separate steps and cuz I think that if you understand the steps individually and you combine them it's much easier to do that way so this life here is a symmetrical bevel it doesn't really matter what side you start sharpening on if you're a righty a sharpener on the right side first if your lefty sharpened on the left side first so that's really my answer there so there's one thing I want to address before we actually start sharpening and it's stone positioning most of the time when you guys watch me sharpening my stones are right directly above me I have seen people send me videos of their stones being much further out I don't recommend having your stones further out because of two main things first is control when you're much further away from stone it's much harder for your body to actually control your angle your wrist has to work a lot harder your arms are extended it doesn't make a really nice comfortable sharpening position to start off with the second thing is pressure you may not realize this but the further your arms are away from your body or the further your hands are away from your body the more you will exert force into the stone I learned this because of my speed skating days when I used to sharpen my 18-inch blades you know on my own I noticed that after a period of time the blades would actually wear out slightly faster on the edges that were away from me and so a lot of speed skaters what they do is compensate for that is to turn the skates around and sharpen both sides equal amount of time so I recommend keeping the stone relatively close to you by not so close that you will cut yourself but just close enough where you have just optimal control down into the stone without having to apply any sort of additional pressure again there's no science to it just find a kind of a nice balance between it being close enough to you and that you're not you know if you're really tall get a bin that's maybe six inches tall if you're shorter like me get a bin that's four inches tall and also depends on what your counter height is so all those things you kind of have to play and figure out for yourself well it's just keep that in mind keep the stone relatively close to you don't let it get too far away the first of the two steps is chopping the tip to the belly or the middle of the belly of the knife and what I want to do is or what you want to do is get the knife onto the stone find your angle and then you go you always want to go a nice gentle curve and you want to let your wrist simply do a slight Bend as you go from tip to belly now my left hand here is a counterbalance to what's happening on the other side of the knife it's really here to help you maintain a balance that's all it is I'm not applying any pressure onto the knife with my left hand okay what you also want to do is keep your body just relaxed you don't want to stiffen up your knees or lock up your knees and you just want to go back and forth and if you want to if you're comfortable you can change your angle slightly bring the spine closer to the stone and see how it feels you're going to find an angle that is going to feel most comfortable for you at some point alright so the next part is the bottom half of the knife and you can see that this knife because it is very straight you can actually literally just put this knife at an angle on a whetstone a 45 degree angle and push up and down the stone and you'll get pretty much the entire 1/3 of this knife or even closer to the bottom half of this knife without doing a whole lot ok so this is what we call the push and pull because you are pushing and pulling up and down the West stone if you were able to you know perfect both of these motions on one knife you can now combine them so basically you don't change any of the angles don't worry about that you go from your tip to the heel and once you get to the heel of middle this the knife you actually want to push slightly okay and I supposed to be following the same arc you want to go up the stone and like as you're coming down you pull flat on the stone and then you bend your elbow slightly okay so it's straight arc arc straight the reason I suggest you guys do this in two motions you know you have your arc and then you push it's because of the flatter you know one-third of this knife if you did a you know a constant radius from their tip to the heel you actually will skip this entire section of his knife and you will sharpen the very heel of this knife you'll skip this region and then you'll sharpen the top you know two-thirds of his knife if you have this knife or a knife very similar to it in terms of his overall profile it's okay to sharpen this knife in two sections you start with the belly and after you feel like you've gotten the belly you go with the bottom half of the knife and there's nothing wrong with that especially in the very beginning knowing how to do these two steps separately will save your knives edge until you get that that muscle control to go from you tip lets you heal now shopping the knife and left sides and be a little bit different and I first saw this address the grip a little bit the left side it's easier for me to actually sharpen this knife with my thumb on the spine so again to bring my middle finger up to the choil get my thumb down first and then I place my index finger of whoever it falls and so that's to me he's the autumn agrippa for the left side of the knife and for most lives it's gonna be the same way alright so again we're gonna break this down into two different steps and then we'll go from there all right you can see right here that if I try to go in an arc from the heel to the tip I'm gonna skip the entire midsection of this life and so I recommend in the beginning getting a nice comfortable push and pull motion down first to sharpen the bottom half his life okay and then when you move towards the once you get to the middle of the knife you can start you can start your arc there okay we're gonna do the middle to the tip again I'm not gonna go all do it to the heel because that's not what we want we want to master Mechanics for this specific sharpen technique so we want to stop at the middle of the night come back to the tip okay so now try going from this motion to the middle of the knife and then doing your push and the push and pull do a few pushes and then you go back to your tip and the middle of the knife again just making sure you stay relaxed not worrying if you go an inch past the center of the knife that's not going to bother the knife at all this is all about practice at this point now if your fingers started crap up if your index finger sauce feel uncomfortable again there's nothing wrong with just having a regular pistol grip and with your thumb on the spine so now let's combine that motion so you can start with any way you want from here what I want to do is I want to start with a slight push a straight push and has it come towards the middle of the knife I start my arc by the time I get to the end of a stone my tip of the knife is there so come back up straight arc straight arc again my left hand is not really doing anything it's just acting as a counterbalance never apply pressure onto the stone with your left hand with this motion keep in mind this sharpen technique is all about control it's not about speed okay and once you have it all down you can combine them for both sides and so now I want to show you guys how to move from this whetstone to the polishing stone and before I move to the polishing stone I wasn't sure that remove all the burrs from this knife on both sides and so I do that with a counting down method basically you want to have relatively close to the number of strokes on each side as you come down to let's say one stroke per side so for example I'll start with the number 10 I'll go ten strokes on each side 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 then go to the left side and do the same thing it's 1 six eight that's ten now I can go down to I can go down to nine everyone too but for the sake of this video I'll go down to six strokes per side alright that's six six now I'll go down to two strokes per side now when I get down to two I typically do this maybe three or four times on each side and a really good method to actually getting a good placement onto the whetstone is starting with your heel on both sides so get your heel down first then start your pull get your heel down first then start your pull all right so now we've been doing two strokes in each side for I don't know four or five times now so now go down to one you can go from tip to heel tip to heel or go from heel to tip heel to tip again no rushing just take your time and generally we'll do this a half a dozen times to a dozen times in each side again letting the stone and the knife do all the work for me I'm not applying any pressure with either of my hands going from heel all the way to the tip all right so I'm gonna grab my polishing whetstone that's been soaking since the beginning of this tutorial I'll be back alright so this is the Rica 5000 and if you guys have seen my channel from the very GetGo from the beginning you guys will know that this was I think this was my very first 5000 polishing stone or my first polishing stone period I listen to a friend and I it was broken by accident so I I still love the stone I don't want to get rid of it there's no sense in getting rid of a perfectly good stone it's missing 40% of the original length of the stone but I still use it it's still perfectly usable and so let's talk about polishing really quickly here so one thing I want to mention is it doesn't make any sense to replicate your entire sharpening process just on a different whetstone because it's a high grit stone you're basically working backwards at that point you don't want to go on to the polishing stone and do everything all over again and then go both sides and then start your comment down method after in your ten minutes of sharpening it doesn't make any sense you simply want to go onto your polish more stone and your single poles exactly where you left off on your sharpening whetstone which is what I'll do right now now I don't have the full length of the stone to work with so my technique has to be adjusted slightly so my poles had to be just slightly shorter on the from the heel to the centre of the knife and then I start my arc wants to get there to the middle of the knife and so I'm just not moving the knife you know up the stone before my arc or down the stone before my Arc I'm moving the stone the knife a little bit less short of travel and then I start my arc again it really comes down to adjusting and making adjustments as you sharpened that's the secret of getting a good sharpening session is being able to adjust with what you have and not worrying about so much about what you actually are using but just worrying more about the technique in the process and focusing on enjoying the shopping process and if I were to move up from this grid I would do the exact same thing just one stroke per side you're allowing the stones to progressively continue the work from the previous stone all right so from here woohoo let's see how this edge is right now all right I won't cut the video it will still be here I'm gonna hold my knife up okay so knife is still wet let's dry it off real quickly here I should use a towel instead of a t-shirt a t-shirt sleeve okay yeah nice and slow guys do a push cut so the knife is still damp that's catching onto the paper but go horizontal to the paper okay so that's directly off of the whetstone let's drop it really quickly here it's not a requirement to get a knife nice and sharp but it's it helps so good okay so this is my new raw equine strop it's a new leather that I've been playing with and I really like this leather it's very high in silicate doesn't behave quite the same as the regular other equine that I have this acquiring tensile work extremely well when you have just completely raw and you don't plan to apply in a sort of striking compound it's a really good leather for that so so just do a single stroke dropped pulse on this drop or a single straw single stroke pulse that's more like it strangles single stroke pulls again you can go from tip to heel or heel the tip it doesn't really matter okay so you can go from heel the tip and I'm going from tip to heel in a J motion on the right side and left side I'm going from heel the tip because of where my knife actually ends so it just it just comes easier that way there's less movement less wasting of movements and to me is the most efficient way to strop alright so that was just a few poles on each side get the same paper here if you wanted to oh yeah listen to that let's get another sheet here oh yeah look at that push cut that is a nice nice clean edge you think yeah yeah so yeah so there you have it you know that is exactly oh you know what the pro tip I forgot the last tip of the site this stone here okay so the thing that I wanted to talk about that I mentioned before there was something I noticed in a lot of my videos you know as I watch my own tutorials and I am editing my own videos there was something I noticed when I sharpen the tip of the knife and it happened a number of times when I'm was repairing the tip and I noticed that the knife actually and on an 8 inch knife it's not as obvious but when I was sharpening your in to 40 millimeters and you 270s you can really see the knife flex when I was shopping the tip and the middle of the knife and so what I started noticing was that my my cutting edge was it's like a hair or two wider from the belly to the tip versus the rest of the knife and so how to kind of compensate for that or how to make sure that that doesn't happen or to minimize that the easiest thing to do is now it sounds easy but it's it's a bit more involved than it really is and it takes a bit more control as well is you literally just raised your knife up a degree from your belly up to the tip I guess I'll use the polishing time for this so there is a slight change and again it's very minut and it's very I don't think it even changes the performance of the knife all that much but it does it does a level of expertise when you are looking at your knife and you see that there is a bevel or a cutting edge that is consistent from the heel to the tip and having a slightly wider cutting angle from the belly to the tip again it doesn't really change anything but to me it just it caught my attention just a little bit so there's two things you can do you can either raise your spine ever so slightly again just by a hair or so or you can actually bring your knife into a slightly more vertical alignment during sharpening and so again it's it's a very my new thing it's something that I've had to really take my time doing and it's much harder on this short because you're going from the heel to tip and then laying the knife down so it's a bit harder on this stroke but if you practice you can do it again steeper angle lower the angle by a degree steep in the angle lower the angle by degree while doing the arc at the tip and then you'll push at the heel so again this is a very my new thing it's you know it it's not crucial it won't make your knife again perform that much better or any better but it's just more aesthetic thing so again this takes a bit more practice it's much easier to do this technique or to kind of just raise your spine when you're doing the push and pull and then as you get towards the latter half of the knife you lean the knife down and then again raise your spine when you're doing your push and pull at the belly in you tip then lower it you raise it back up when you lower it okay so in the push and pull method that's much easier to do it's a bit more difficult to do when you're trying to go one single motion though but it is possible it just takes a bit more focus to do once I have started implementing that technique into my sharpening I've noticed that my cutting edge is much more consistent from your tip to the heel for a home cook like me that really won't make a difference at all but if you are running a sharpening business or you want to start a shopping business that is something to take note of because people who buy three four hundred dollar knives or even knives in a thousand dollar range will take note of that and that is just a very minor detail that they may just say this guy knows what he's doing or this gal knows what she's doing if you want a real practice of that technique try it out on your push and pull method first before doing this crescent you know about Cramer style sharpening that is something I've never seen explained in any video or any tutorials that I've watched that's something that I've just learned and experienced on my own I don't know how long this video is I'm guessing is probably at least twenty-five oh I gotta go pick up my kids real soon okay yeah so my kids are in preschool I gotta go pick all three of them up I would do the unboxing that just came in I'm really curious but that is I don't know what it is it'll take me more than the few minutes that I have to open this box up so I'm not gonna do it today I'll either do a separate unboxing video for this box or I will unbox it at the end of the next video so just keep you know kind of keep posted keep posted keep in touch I don't just keep an eye on my channel yeah I don't know what's in here okay anyway it gives me um I love doing these long-form tutorials because that's what my channel started with and I haven't done it in so long so let me know what you guys think if you guys want to see more videos like this I will do more I'll just go through my rack of knives back here and will sharpen different profiles and you know and spend a few minutes breaking down different sharpen techniques for each knife and you know have some fun while we're doing it I'm not a master at sharpening but no master is born a master you train to become a master and you know hopefully I can give you guys that you guys need and the skills and the knowledge that you guys need to master your own sharpen techniques for your personal knives and then you guys will develop your own technique as well as your sharpen that's the goal of my channel that's what I love doing thumbs up if you guys enjoy the video subscribe if you guys want to see more like it and also let me know in the comments if you guys have knives that you want me to sharpen that you own that you're having trouble sharpening maybe I can help you guys out in that department alright well thank you guys for being here and I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Burrfection

Views: 656,525

Keywords: how to sharpen chef knife, how to sharpen bob kramer knife, bob kramer, bob kramer knives

Id: VZYK3rNjvyI

Length: 31min 48sec (1908 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020