Is This Knife Worth Sharpening?

hey everyone Nate here with SimplySharp and today I want to talk about another very common question I get which is um is it worth sharpening my knives um I get that a lot or um you know somebody will say hey I’ve kind of got these cheap knives um I don’t even know if it’s worth sharpening and what I tell everyone is that pretty much any knife I can get really sharp and it’s going to cut great however the nicer knives or more expensive Knives have better metals that will hold their sharpness longer so we call that edge retention so they will stay sharp longer that being said if you take carrier knives with honing so if you look at my um I made a Facebook video about honing a knife um and how tell when your knife is no longer sharp um if you do that even these cheap knives uh will stay sharp for a reasonable amount of time um but you know if you’re really kind of battling or worried about um hey I’m gonna pay Nate to sharpen these knives are they just going to be dull in like a day if you’re doing that much cooking I would just say let’s go ahead and invest in in some nicer knives now that being said a lot of times when I get that so so I’m here sharpening my friend Kathy’s knives and so Kathy drops off a bag of cheap knives that she’s embarrassed by right so um but I pull it out and this is a Hinkle and here’s another Hinkle and then there’s like two more Hinkles and maybe an Old Chicago Cutlery a knife I don’t even know what it is and some other stuff so she has some nice knives in here like these Hinkles um it’s not the nicest knife it’s not the most expensive knife you’ll buy but it is a really good knife they sharpen really well they stay sharp for a reasonably long time especially if you hone them um so if you’ve got Henkels in there it’s a good knife I’d get them sharpened um I sharpened a ton of these interestingly Hinkle is um a larger company I never remember if it’s like Hinkle or Hinkle swelling or swelling Hinkle but whatever they’re a larger company that has two big brands of knives Hinkle is kind of their mid brand zwilling is their High brand and you can tell because this is you might have seen this on a lot of your knives there’s like that little guy right there that one single guy that’s a Hinkle when you see two of those guys that’s as willing zwilling is the German word for twin so a major difference so some time ago all these knives were made in Germany but as many companies have a lot of production moved to China so Henkel will actually make some of these knives in China this one you’ll see a made in China stamp on it it is a stamped piece of metal which means there’s just a sheet of metal the general shape of the knife was Stamped Out put some handles on it sharpened the blade away you go versus a zwilling those are all made in Germany they are much higher quality metal a much more expensive knife and they’re um it’s called a forge knife so it’s not a single big sheet of metal that a whole bunch of knives got Stamped Out of then sharpened it’s a piece of metal that was formed into a knife um and then it was sharpened what that gets you is generally uh better quality uh less defects in it uh almost always a much much much much better quality of Steel that is going to be both uh likely more resistant to corrosion but mostly is going to hold its Edge really well and be able to be sharpened to a really high degree so there you go I do also get a lot of knives like this I have no idea what this knife is um you know I can just tell it’s a stamp knife it has a little bit of Edge on it but it’s definitely rolled over um I don’t know this could have been a ten dollar knife it could have been a five dollar knife but what I can tell you is it’s going to be pretty sharp here in a minute um so we’ll do this um so thank you Costco for all the extra paper um you guys have seen this before but here it is you know our Cheapo knife foreign that’s like the only way I can cut right we’re gonna get that nice and sharp uh and then again it will stay reasonably sharp uh if you take care of it all right so you know the first thing I’m I’m usually going to do when I sharpen is um I almost always go through a three belt progression it’ll start with a pretty rough belt uh this is 120 grit and then I move up to like a six or an 800 grit and then we finally finish it with a leather strop and I’ll talk about each of those but this first one is really going to reshape The Edge and if a knife is not in a pretty rough shape or if it’s actually pretty decent you’re just kind of you know touching it up a little bit um you might not need this like you could get away with something like a 200 or a 220 grit belt but I usually kind of always start here because I mean this knife needs a little bit of help um and it’s just a great place to start and we’ll put a little point back on it as well um and the angle so uh all of these Knives have a bevel on each Edge right and there’s two ways to do this like some people will say hey it’s a 15 or 20 degree that just means on one side um if you go to like Hinkle’s website they’ll say the angle is 30 degrees that’s what’s called inclusive so that means you know 15 on this side 15 on that side that’s 30 degrees um so that’s kind of how that works but what we’re going to do for a knife like this uh since it is not the highest quality metal I’m pretty sure we’re going to put it at a 20 degree angle which will still be really quite sharp but it’ll also be a little bit more resilient it’ll hold up just a little bit better um so that’s set to 20 degrees but I can go anywhere from 10 to 35 with this machine so you know this this little um uh Ken Onion Pro from Work Sharp is just amazing with this attachment you can really do a lot with it including a lot of different angles in there so let’s get started we’re going to get this Edge on it and then we’ll just work through the progression with with this knife so I will start it uh usually at the lowest speed that this thing will do um so that’s that’s that’s the lowest speed I can go pretty high that’s like if you really need to do some major grinding and repair work um but here we go so this is a reference plane which means when I put it up to the belt right there it’s whatever angle I’d set which in this case is 20 degrees so we’re just going to go in here and foreign person I could probably come in here and show you um but I can feel that I’ve raised a burr I can just feel it um I don’t know if you’re gonna see any of that on the camera or not but it just looks like a like a white line just running up and down the edge of the blade so the Burrs on this side because I did it like that lasted pushes the metal over that way when you’ve got that Burr that edge is as sharp as it as it can be and then the rest of this exercise is refining that edge to take out some of the scratches at such such a rough belt leaves on it and to take that Burr off so let’s go ahead and do that we’re going to do that here with our next belt which is going to be you know about about in the neighborhood of 600 grit um a lot of people do it differently there are many many many finer belts um the reason I like this anywhere from here to like a thousand or so is it will still leave a little bit of of um like grain in the the edge of the knife right there and those kind of little uh grains we call it like tooth or bite it kind of helps grab into what you’re cutting and just helps with the cutting process um you would not want that on something like a razor for example you want that to just be really really uh super polished and and very well refined so you go many many higher grits than what we’re doing here but for a kitchen knife uh you don’t want to overdo it you want to leave some of that bite in the knife so what we’re going to do is just multiple passes to knock that Burr off and refine this Edge you’ll notice I’m not really using this reference plane that’s just because I kind of know my hands just kind of no now I’ve got some some muscle memory in there that uh is helping me out so I think that’s pretty well refined Next Step here is a strop so this is a leather belt and um you load it up with either compound or something that is basically a very very fine abrasive so you get this dirty called compound there’s also these Solutions of various abrasive things like diamond dust and all sorts of stuff this is actually loaded with um something similar it’s called gunny juice I think the guy makes it out of graphene or something crazy like that um but anyways this is going to really kind of Polish up the belt and if there is any Burr left it’s going to go ahead and take it off just kind of looking there to make sure there wasn’t any Burr or anything else left on there that kind of want to try to polish out all right so that should be it let’s see how we did all right uh so here we go we’re back to our magazine it’s uh piece of paper here okay so a little snag there let’s see yeah I can feel it just kind of right in there so we’re actually just gonna hit it some more over here foreign so anyways we could do better right um and I’ll touch this up but there we go like that’s way better than it was right and some of this is just I’m running into the limitations of the knife so you’re gonna cut any food perfectly fine um you cannot get all blade super crazy sharp that is one of the things about the metal but this is now a nice pretty sharp blade I’m still doing a little bit more work on it and we’re going to fix that tip all right so to do this tip we are going to come off the back of the knife so we can so I don’t know how much this comes through but you know there’s some geometry here like you know this is pretty flat then it kind of comes in it almost feels like it could be a con uh concave surface right there and there’s the actual bevel of the knife and then you know it’s curving up that way so you know if we just shave the knife down like that we’re going to lose some of this geometry that they’ve created uh the better way to do is to come off the the spine of the knife and we’re going to come right down there and grab that guy and make a nice sharp point you definitely want to watch Heat buildup um especially with uh you know like smaller knives thinner knives stuff like that like there’s not a lot of metal that carry away the Heat and this can actually generate quite a lot of heat you want to be mindful of that um the Heat so knife makers a lot of metals do what’s called heat treatment and you know it’s a process of heating up the knife um and that uh basically causes um it doesn’t really melt but like the crystals have a chance to kind of Reform with each other and make tighter bonds more uniform bonds as a way of getting stronger steel with less imperfections in it so that heat treatment makes steel stronger uh but it’s done a certain way this could get it so hot that it would ruin that heat treatment and then your knife would not we’re already battling a knife with not great metal might not have even been heat treated um but it will be even less performance after that so there we go like we didn’t do much but now we’ve got a point on our knife and then I’m just going to touch this up a little bit because I don’t like this shape there we go a little bit more yeah I have to take it all right and then it’s probably wholly unnecessary but what I like to do is um just kind of just so they can leave a little bit of a harsh Edge right there so I just like to kind of take that off and then this is probably way overkill for this knife because I just think that it’s never really gonna cut through magazine paper super well but we’re here so we do it plus I will usually um handle fixing that broken tip at the beginning that way it’s just a lot more efficient all the same belts are there but you also get kind of like deal with anything lingering in the tip of the blade or anything like that um as you sharpen it so there we go instead of repositioning everything let’s just try it like this so there we go cheap knife super Sharp all right so I was sharpening the rest of Kathy’s knives that um that you see back there and I just wasn’t really happy with the way this performed so I actually re-sharpened it to 15 degrees per side and now I think it’ll be a little bit better off so there we go um so probably missed on the right angle for that one um but point stands as now a very nice sharp knife even though it’s less expensive you can keep it in shape with a hone and it’s going to cut great