Knife Knerd Ep2 When to Sharpen

hello everyone this is Nate with SimplySharp and continuing along with our series on knife maintenance and Care um I want to talk about how you know when your knife uh needs to be sharpened like how do I know it’s dull um I’ll say the first thing is you’re probably even asking that question right so um there’s a good chance that if it doesn’t just feel sharp it’s probably losing its Edge uh I will always tell people the first thing you should do is try to hone it um this is a honing steel check out our video on that um nine times out of 10 that’ll really increase the performance of The Knife um but knives will lose their Edge and if you’ve honed it and you’re still not noticing a difference then certainly time to uh to sharpen um the other thing you can do and you’ll see me do this a lot when uh when people call me up I go to their house and I’m kind of inspecting their knives I’m looking at them and I do this thing I kind of will do that I’m touching the edge of the knife to my fingernail if there’s an edge on that knife and it’s no pressure that’s like not even the weight of the knife it’s just nothing um it bites into my nail right and it it I can I can just feel that very slight bit of resistance if you don’t want to use your thumbnail because you got nice nails or you’re just grossed out by it you can use a Sharpie it should just stick to the edge of the Sharpie right um if the knife is dull it’s some of it sticks like right there right it’s just sliding off um it’ll do the same thing on my on my fingernail so that is one way to uh test if you’re R of an edge and again if it if it’s doing that try honing and then if it still does it after honing give us a call we’d love to sharpen your knives um another thing that I tell a lot of people is a cucumber is a pretty good test um so a cucumber ha well let talk about tomatoes um it’s nice to be able to like slice right through a tomato but it’s a little bit of an unfair test you guys would be calling me every month if you just simply weren’t able just to slice right through a tomato super easily um there’s just not a lot uh inside of a tomato to allow the knife to get through the edge like the the skin just pushes down into the soft part of the Tomato so it’s just a little bit of an unfair test but a really sharp knife will go flying right through a tomato I I like a cucumber um it’s got a pretty hard skin on it right so if you have a sharp knife it should just B you could just push right through it right you don’t have you don’t have to do anything you might need to just give it a little start and just have like a little slice right but what you whoa what you don’t need to do is saw at it so this knife I don’t know we’ll see actually this one’s not that bad let’s try this guy yeah so this one you know still Cuts right so a Dull Knife will still cut but I am sawing at that skin a little bit versus and I don’t know if you could see how much pressure I was exerting there was quite a lot versus even this slightly dull knife and this knife even sharper it just goes right through or I can just right so super sharp see what this one does yeah so um so I think a cucumber is a really good test it’s a lot more fair than something like a tomato um if you are having to kind of saw back and forth to get through that skin um again light pressure using too much pressure is what causes accidents with knives and it’s why they say a sharp knife is a safe knife because you’re just a lot less energy at play If The Knife slips it only moves like an inch or so versus sliding off a cutting board and into a finger or a hand or something um so yeah there we go if you’re having any troubles with the Cucumber give us a call