Knife Knerd Ep1 Why Sharpen

hello everyone Nate here with SimplySharp and uh today we’re just talk about knives themselves this is part of our uh knife maintenance and Care series that we’re working on and um you know knives are one of Mankind’s oldest tools uh they’ve been around forever maybe after the club and The Rock uh probably knife is our oldest tool and knife sharpeners are one of the oldest professions um maybe the second oldest after that other oldest profession um but yeah when when people kind of really started um you know moving into cities and living in cities and you had different types of professions and whatnot uh you know a lot of people were obviously cooking their own meals or were their own butchers or whatever and they needed somebody to sharpen their knives and so you see all these pictures of a guy with a wheel that he’s pedaling and going around from town to town sharpening knives um those were called tinkerers uh anyways so a knife is just a piece of metal and its purpose is to maximize the amount of pressure that you can exert so cutting anything is just the ability to divide whatever it is that you’re cutting by pushing through it right and you need a lot of pressure to do that you cannot cut through a steak with the edge of your hand no matter how good of a ninja you are or how strong you are you’re not going to be able to cut through the steak with just your hand because it’s too wide there’s just too much area there you cannot exert enough pressure to do that a knife is intended to concentrate all that force in a very small area so if you think of pressure we think of pounds per square inch if you exert 10 pounds of force on one square inch that’s 10 pounds per square inch of pressure with a knife we take that surface area and really concentrated into a very very very small surface area so if you wanted to increase the amount of pressure you could push harder 20 30 40 50 pounds right to ramp that up in that same square sare inch you’d be at 50 lbs per square inch for example or you can reduce the surface area so with the same 10 lbs if you had a tenth of an inch you are now at 100 pounds per square inch and that’s what this is doing it’s just concentrating all the force that your arm is generating into a very small area now because of that when a knife starts to go dull that surface area right there at the edge just right at the very edge which is just not even microns thick um suddenly becomes three four five six seven 10 times the surface area that it used to be and so while it can still cut through stuff it doesn’t cut as well because it’s not applying as much pressure um it’s also why as knives go dull you have to exert more pressure and that’s why they say uh dull knives are more dangerous because you’re putting a lot more energy into it and if something slips and goes off there’s a lot more energy behind it um but yeah so that’s the kind of basics of uh the knife physics as far as knives cells are are concerned um they are a consumable product knives were made and originally and today to be sharpened um there is no such thing as a knife that’s never going to have to be sharpened and a lot of things go into how long it stays sharp how much you use it what kind of cutting surface you’re using how well you take care of it a cocktail of metals and angles and all sorts of stuff but every knife goes dull and every knife can be sharpened and they were they were they were made for that so you know a $200 miabi is not going to stay sharp your entire lifetime it’s going to need to be sharpened um and I think a lot of people it’s just one of those things that you don’t really think about because you can have an knife for 20 years it’ll still kind of cut through something and you just started using more force and you forgot what it used to be like when it when it was sharp um but yeah uh consumable products they were meant to be sharpened and and the more you um take care of them and then periodically have them sharpen the easier they’re going to cut through stuff because you’re taking advantage of all that physics and you can apply a lot more pressure