memes

It's way easier than people make it out to be, unless you're chasing very specific things. Like, if you want to literally split a hair in two, expect to spend time refining your techniques.

Otherwise? You're rubbing metal on a rock. You can sharpen a knife on a brick and get a damn sharp edge on it in five to ten minutes, no bullshit, no hyperbole.

There's two things that matter: burrs and removing burrs.

What's a burr?

When you rub a knife against a rock long enough, the very tippy edge is going to roll over a tiny bit. That's a burr.

Once you get one all along the edge, flip that sucker and do it on the other side until a new burr forms. Boom! First thing done.

Now you have to remove that burr and finish up the edge. Use real gentle pressure and alternate sides on the same stone you just used. Lift the back of the knife a teeny bit higher than when you were grinding it before.

Do this maybe five times each side, then check the edge. Most types of steel, you should be able to make a clean slice in a piece of paper. If it can't, give it a few more passes and try again.

If you raised a burr in the first place, you'll get rid of it fairly quick, so if you've hit maybe twenty passes trying to remove it, chances are you didn't raise a burr, you just thought you did. No biggie, they can be hard to see or feel sometimes. Particularly with really hard steels. Might have to go back and try again.

However, there's a nice little trick to help. Get a sharpie and mark that edge. When you're grinding, if you've got an angle close to what's already there, you'll remove the ink and know youre on track. If there's a band of ink left at the edge, you're too shallow. Ink left towards the back, too deep.

Truth is, for a useable edge, it doesn't matter what the angle actually is, only that it's fairly consistent along any straight sections. Yeah, the more acute the angle, the better it's going to work for some tasks, but a morr obtuse one has benefits too. So don't worry about nailing some arbitrary angle. That's for later, once it becomes a hobby as much as a tool maintenance task.

Legit, while you can get fiddly with sharpening and fine tune a given knife to be better at specific tasks, that's optional. You can take a crappy knife, run it over a crappy stone and cut things. That's what matters; that it works. And the learning curve to get to where it works isn't huge.