What Do "Knife Sharpening" Honing Steels Actually Do?

so what exactly does a knife steel do what are these things and why do they exist well today I'm going to show you what these things do what they don't do why I think these things are completely outdated technology and show you a much better option to fix the problem that these only temporarily solve these things don't do what most people think they do and it needs to stop now the thing I'm referring to here is something called a knife steel or a nonabrasive honing rod these things are not knife sharpeners sharpen it before and every time you use it they contain no abrasive qualities whatsoever they're actually made from steel and designed to do one thing which is to straighten rolled edges we see this isn't entirely true now what is a rolled Edge you may ask well let me show you now in order to show you what a rolled Edge is and what it isn't we've got to start with a sharp knife so we sharpened it on a 400 grit Diamond Stone created a burr and here's what that looks like now I'm showing you this for context this is what a burr looks like at extreme magnification I got some new equipment that allows us to get even closer than even some microscopes and for some more context this is a single strand of hair and this is a ballpoint pen or part of it now this is only about half of the magnification I have available to me now but at these higher magnification ratios things start to become unrecognizable sort of like looking at something from 2 in away I have absolutely no idea what this is so now we're just going to minimize the bur by doing some alternating light passes on the stone and then to fully refine our 400 Edge we went on to a fresh three Micron Diamond drop and here's the edge after the bird has been removed and the hair for reference notice the reflection of the hair on the blade now the standard definition you'll hear of what knife honing Steels do and why they're typically used in kitchens is this kitchen knives are more prone to Ed rolling since they're typically ground very thin and a thin Apex is more prone to rolling over when coming into contact with things like a cutting board bone other kitchen utensils a stainless steel cooktop Etc hence the need for a honing rod in order to quickly straighten that rolled Edge back out now this sounds good on the surface but the problem is is that it's not actually what's happening let's take a look do some experiments and see what's going on so to get started let's create a true rolled Edge now I'm artificially rolling the edge here on a piece of copper pipe this is perfect for Rolling The Edge without creating damage to the Apex and even though this is a $1 knife from the dollar store and ground very thin it does take quite a bit of pressure to roll over this Edge indeed someone would have to work very hard to roll this $1 knife edge more on this in a minute here's what that rolled Edge looks like up close on the surface it sort of looks like a burd and I think that this is where the confusion comes in you'll often hear people talk about straightening the Burr on the edge of the knife using a knife steel or honing Rod this is not a burr this is actually the Apex bent over in comparison you'll see that a burr is much more irregular and rough looking as opposed to the nice clean bent over Apex and this is the road Edge from the other side and you can see where the Apex X transitions from straight to rolled so now that we have a rolled Edge this is where something like a knife steel or honing Rod comes into play because ideally if we could rest straighten that bent over Apex our knife will be sharp again without going through the entire sharpening process now the correct way to use this is to use Edge trailing Strokes on the honing Rod so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do Edge trailing strokes and we're going to see if we can rest straighten the roll a lot of times you'll see people doing this super fast and that does nothing I'll show you this in a minute so after a handful of passes on the honing rod and without even going to our extreme magnification we still have quite the edge roll on the Apex of this knife so as you can see from our first attempt at using the h Rod knife steel uh we didn't actually do anything so this is after a handful of light passes just like you see everybody doing on TV now looks like it completely destroyed the Apex essentially we did nothing using this now let's adjust our technique and see if anything changes so rather than light passes like you see everybody doing we're going to increase the pressure and do some heavy backward passes to see if we can get enough pressure here to rest straighten the rolled Edge now before I do this keep in mind that in order to roll the edge in the first place took quite a bit of pressure on that copper pipe it took a lot of pressure for me to roll that Apex over now all things being equal theoretically in order for me to rest straighten that Apex that same amount of pressure is going to have to be applied in order to straighten that Apex back out so let's try to use some pretty high pressure on this and see if we can get that to work so after a little bit more uh aggressive passes you can see our Apex is starting to look a little bit odd and here's what the Apex looks like and as you can see it is not pretty it is completely destroyed so what exactly is going on here and why isn't this thing working to straighten a rolled Edge now over the past several weeks I have used this thing in every single way that I can possibly think of I've tried to use it with light pressure I've tried to use it with heavy pressure I've even tried to go super fast like you see on TV a nonabrasive honing Rod will not straighten a true rolled Edge in fact it actually damages a true rolled Edge even worse than it already [Music] is so that is sort of what your rolled Edge looks like now here is the surface of the knife steel this is the honing Rod right you have your grooves here so what's going to happen and I'm asking this and I'll show you this in a second when this nice fine point here comes into contact with the steel at this point right here well it doesn't do pretty things case in point now clearly people have been using these forever and swear that they do in fact work which means that I'm wrong now it just means that there is a lack of understanding on what these actually do and the terminology now as I explained earlier in this video there is a difference between a burr and a true rolled Edge a non-abrasive honing Rod or honing steel like this one will not straighten a true rolled Edge at least not without other bad things happening like completely destroying the Apex in the first place what these will do is straighten a burr and that is where the problem with these arise shop it you keep using the hor I don't know think it means what you think it means so I'm going to do here is put a burr back on this knife we'll bend it over doing something and then we will rest straighten it using the honing Rod so this is the Burr straight off of the sharpening stone and you can see a little red mark at the bottom of the picture and that let me know that I'm looking at the exact same spot on the blade every single time just as a reference so we put our burr back on the knife and I have a piece of hardwood here this is actually Hickory a lot of cutting boards are made out of hardwood and what we're going to do to sort of mess up this Burge we're just going to let it come in contact with some hardwood so this is actually really interesting this is what that Burr looks like after hitting it on on our replica cutting board for maybe two dozen times or so it literally looks like it's rolled over on itself so now what we're going to do now that we have our bur somewhat folded over is we're simply going to do a couple of light alternating passes to straighten that burr back out and here we go and again very interesting because it looks like it literally looks like the edge has been unrolled or straightened and I think that this is exactly where that sort of myth comes from that these sharpening Steels straighten a rolled Edge but what it's actually straightening is the Burr you see a properly sharpened knife should have the Burr completely removed in the first place there shouldn't be a burr on the knife for this thing to even straighten and again back to our original properly sharpened Apex with the Burr removed this is what your Edge should look like so what these actually do is temporarily fix a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place now I've actually done a video on this which I'll leave a link to up here somewhere not sure which side it's going to pop up that shows the difference between a knife cutting with the bur and one that is cutting with the bur properly removed and the difference is staggering we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of times greater Edge retention cutting with a knife that's had the Burr properly removed in the first place so let's repeat the same test again with a properly sharpened knife we'll resharpen this we'll properly remove the Burr and then smash it into some wood to see if there's a difference and here's our sharpened knife with the Burr properly removed the knife is indeed sharp whittling a hair no problem now smashing it into our cutting board block like we did before rocking the blade back and forth to make sure I did indeed contact the exact point we did before and I did this a whole bunch of times okay maybe a little more than two dozen times and boom here it is after it basically looks like nothing happened to it zero difference and it's still hair widling chart what's happened here is that these were invented before we really had an understanding of what was truly going on at the knife Apex and people didn't have the technology available to them or maybe the experience to know how to properly remove a burr or that there was even such a thing as a burr in the first place so what's a good alternative to the honing steel I'd recommend either a cheap $20 Diamond Stone like this one or if you want to stick with the same theme you can get an abrasive honing rod and an abrasive honing rod works in exactly the same way only it contains an abrasive either a diamond or ceramic or if you want to stick with the tried and true Diamond Stone these can be used in exactly the same way that you use a knife steel it's literally the exact same motion using an abrasive stone or honing rod in the exact same way that you would use a steel like this will not only help reduce and remove the unwanted Burr but will also be capable of fixing a true rolled Edge so I went back and rolled the edge again using the same copper pipe method that I used previously I then used my $20 Diamond Stone and made 10 light passes per side in the same manner that I would make using a knife steel so again here's what that edge roll looks like and then after the 10 passes on the diamond Stone we get a nice clean burree rollf free Apex very easy to do and just as fast as using a knife steel honing Rod so my advice as a professional knife maker and knife sharpener is that if you find yourself having to use one of these you really need to go back and properly sharpen your knife these will not straighten a true rolled Edge what these will do is straighten a burr that should have been properly removed in the first place not only will properly sharpening your knife save you time in the long run but it'll also save you an awful lot of aggravation these will not straighten a true rolled Edge these will straighten a burd and that is why as a professional knife maker and knife sharpener prior to this video I've never actually used one of these and while going forward I never will [Music] again we call [Applause] you can [Applause] [Music] tonight [Music] leashes are falling like L the that we all are the

Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 660,128

Keywords: knife sharpening, honing rod, kitchen knife sharpening, honing kitchen knife, chefs knife sharpener, sharpening a knife, how to sharpen a knife, honing, knife honing, how to sharpen a kitchen knife, chef ramsey knife sharpening, knife sharpening for beginners, sharpen, sharpening, chefs knife, kitchen knife sharpen, sharpen a knife, sharp knife

Id: Y4ReQ83CZOQ

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024