1. Common indirections that are commonly made in sharpening knives are uncontrolled bevel angles, failure to establish a new edge, and leaving the final bevel too rough.
2. Pick an angle to sharpen your knife. If you already know what angle your knife is sharpened at, it is best is to sharpen at this angle again. If you can't find the angle but you wish to, ask the blade company or inquire at a kitchen blade store to determine what angle is appropriate for your knife. Otherwise, you must make a decision: choose an angle of 10°-30° per side; shallower angles make a sharper edge that doesn't last as long, steep angles are more durable, 17° is a good compromise: select an angle that matches the use the knife will receive. When shopping for a sharpening system, make sure it provides an edge guide mechanism that will sharpen knives at a few different angles.
3, If you could, use an angle guide to control your edge's angle. Otherwise, you will have to guess the correct angle to use, which is hard and requires a well-formed perception of angles.
4. For a symmetrical edge, sharpen the blade of your knife using this technique, drag it across the oil lubricated stone in the opposite direction you would move it to slice a thin layer off the stone. This allows a burr to form and prolongs the stone's life.
5. Continue grinding at this angle until your grind goes roughly half way through the steel. Don't worry if this is not the case , just guess. For a one-sided edge ("scandi grind", "chisel grind", etc.),
6. Once one side is done, turn the blade to the blunt side and continue; the easiest way to know if you done this correctly is to sharpen until you have raised a "burr", a feature that steel will naturally form when one bevel is ground until it meets another. It will generally be too small to see, but you can feel it scraping/catching on your thumb if you stroke away (dull side of the knife to the sharp) from the edge. Finer stones produce smaller burrs, but they are still there.
7. Turn the blade to the other side and sharpen the other side of the blade in a similar fashion.
8. Remove the resulting burr by "cutting into" a hone (a finer stone). That is, still holding the blade at the same controlled angle, move the blade in the opposite direction you moved the blade in steps 4-8. Some people feel this step should be done with a dry stone for reasons beyond the scope of this article.
9. If you wish, you may decide to polish or even strop the edge to the desired sharpness. For push cutting, stroping the edge's will give you better results (cutting directly into materials, pushing straight down without sliding the blade across the object) but generally impairs slicing ability: without the 'microscopic serrations' left by grinding with a stone, the blade tends to not bite into things like tomato skins.
I personally use the
Global Knife Sharpener.
