What’s the difference between sharpening a knife and honing it?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “knife honer vs sharpener“
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What’s the difference between sharpening a knife and honing it?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “knife honer vs sharpener“
About Reagan
1 Thinning reduces blade thickness across a broader area, making sharpening easier, and the overall wedge shape of a blade more acute (thinner). This makes sharpening easier and much faster, and the end result better for slicing.
2 Sharpening Thins the actual bevel all the way down to the edge. (Instead of creating a different bevel angle (thinning) you are fixing the existing edge by grinding back the steel till it meets the edge once again.
3 honing You have thinned, ground the edge (sharpened) and the final edge needs to be cleaned up, perfected, and increased in it’s refinement. This requires finer stones, a more careful touch, or some stropping. It also means even more precise angle control.
by honing, you are taking the now sharp edge, and making the very edge part of that even sharper. If you like to hone and sharpen at the same angle, then you are just re doing the same angles with different abrasives and lighter pressure to get a more refined result.
Because after all, sharpening gets you back to an edge, once there, you have a variety of ways to deal with cleaning it up, and the first of these is simply more care, and less pressure.
This can be extended to using finer stones for honing, If you use really fine stones to hone, these stones are called “hones”. The last, finest stone you use, is always called a “hone” regardless of the exact grit, (degree of fineness)
Stropping is a specific aspect of honing. many people hone, then strop. That is to say, they hone, then super fine hone in reverse on soft materials that have very very fine abrasives on them. This creates an insanely sharp edge, and I like my knives that way.
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As Eunji said, a honing steel is for straightening the knife, not for sharpening. Honing is done fairly frequently, maybe even on each serious use session of the knife (although it depends on the blade)
As for sharpening a knife, if it’s a particularly high end or difficult knife, I’d consider sending it to the manufacturer for sharpening — a lot of the high-end knifemakers will do this for free for a lifetime. This mainly applies to serrated knives, or really hard materials (high-end specialty stainless) or non-standard angles.
Absolutely do not use a power sharpeners. I usually use either a DMT diamond sharpener or a Japanese waterstone (or Arkansas whetstone)
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Sharpening a knife means actually taking off metal to create an edge again. Honing a knife is realigning the edge. The steel that people associate with sharpening a knife is actually for honing.
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Everybody, just NO. Honing IS sharpening. Honing is the wearing away of steel in a controlled manner with the objective of flattening the bevel faces and making them meet in a sharp apex, which is the edge. Grinding, as the term is normally used, establishes the shape and geometry of the blade overall but honing is only concerned with the bevel faces and their intersection. Yes, honing is a form of grinding, but it is more targeted, more precise, limited in scope, and usually done with reciprocating or linear motion against a flat medium where grinding is generally done with a rotating abrasive element.
Re-aligning the bent, dinged, or folded over edge is STROPPING. This is so, whether the tool used is a hanging leather strop, a paddle or bench strop, a piece of seat belt or fire hose or strip of coarse linen, or a butcher’s steel, or the back of another knife. This, from someone who darn well should know, not an amateur and not a cook or chef or an internet know it all.
Let me say this, though. It can safely be said that semantically, anything that makes a knife sharper is sharpening. And so a pull-through such as the Lansky Quad-Sharp, in use, is sharpening. You could stretch the point and say that stropping, which takes a knife that is not cutting so well and makes it cut quite a lot better in only a few seconds, is sharpening. The term is, then, very imprecise and most knowledg…
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The excellent eGullet Tutorial on Knife Sharpening & Maintence: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/26036-knife-maintenance-and-sharpening/page__view__findpost__p__353915 has an entire section devoted to honing.
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The excellent eGullet Tutorial on Knife Sharpening & Maintence: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/26036-knife-maintenance-and-sharpening/page__view__findpost__p__353915 has an entire section devoted to honing.
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As Eunji said, a honing steel is for straightening the knife, not for sharpening. Honing is done fairly frequently, maybe even on each serious use session of the knife (although it depends on the blade)
As for sharpening a knife, if it’s a particularly high end or difficult knife, I’d consider sending it to the manufacturer for sharpening — a lot of the high-end knifemakers will do this for free for a lifetime. This mainly applies to serrated knives, or really hard materials (high-end specialty stainless) or non-standard angles.
Absolutely do not use a power sharpeners. I usually use either a DMT diamond sharpener or a Japanese waterstone (or Arkansas whetstone)
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As I see it the difference is quite blur.
To sharpen a knife to me means to regenerate it by removing a remarkable amount of material on the edge, using coarse abrasives.
To hone means removing a smaller amount of material (the tiny burrs), using finer abrasives.
At least that’s my conclusion after using a wide variety of sharpening devices which offer both sharpening and honing functions. The same techniques are called sharpening if you work on a coarse stone/belt/rod, and honing if it’s soft, fine materials.
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Honing a knife is the process of using a succession of grit stones to re-shape the edge-bevel. After the bevel (usually about twenty degrees) is shaped, every time we sharpen the knife, we change the bevel a little, by doing so. Generally, the bevel becomes shorter, and more rounded, unless you have no idea what you’re doing, in which case the bevel ends up looking like something chewed by an angle grinder. Such ignorance also does severe damage to the “body” of a blade, as well. Honing properly re-establishes the “V” shape of the edge (there are other edge-shapes desired by professionals, but we’re keeping it simple).
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The act of honing grinds the actual substance of steel off of the knife itself, reducing its weight, every time.
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Using the blade to cut things flattens or otherwise distorts the bottom line of the “V”, making the knife dull again.
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To SHARPEN the knife, we pass it over a “sharpening steel” several times. This tool looks like a miniature fencing foil, with tiny longitudinal grooves, and no button on the end, and is usually about 15” long, counting the wooden handle.
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Doing this makes the long bottom of the “V” return to its proper form. It is simply “pushed” back into place. A knife can often be sharpened dozens of times in this way, before re-grinding the bevel through honing.
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If you run into a guy who believes he’s a great knife-sharpener, but does not use a sharpening steel, he is NOT a great knife-sharpener. He is an idiot, who destroys blades very fast, through constant honing, rather than sharpening. Each time he hones, he is grinding away more and more of the steel. This is why his honing-stones turn black: the guy is slowly ripping steel off the knife, onto the stone.
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Those knives you’ve seen ground down from an inch in width to a 1/4 inch “fillet-knife”? Idiots did that.
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With a single exception: a person who uses a knife all day, every day, like a butcher, or a fish-cleaner, will have to sharpen his knife many times in a day. Thus, he may have to hone his knife daily, or even more often, due to wear, from proper sharpening.
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If a guy offers to “sharpen” your knife, but does not even OWN a sharpening steel, run away.
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THAT guy does NOT understand the process, and will simply grind more steel off your blade every time he pointlessly re-hones a perfectly good bevel.
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Every REAL knife-sharpener owns and uses a steel. If he does not, tell him to read the proper process, buy a steel, and come back when he’s less ignorant.
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Time and time again, I’ve seen a lovely new knife ruined in short order by the legion of mad honers out there. They are pig-ignorant, and should not be allowed to touch anything but Frost Cutlery, and other 440 stainless steel “knives” which both begin, AND end their lives, best used as trot-line weights.
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Learning this process yourself takes a bit of time, but is well worth it. I can “sharpen” a knife in ten seconds.
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So can you, if you decide to learn, and start slowly.
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Sharpening a blade means that you have to make the edges of the knife which got worn. After sharpening the knife, the blade of the knife becomes really sharp.
Whereas Honing a Knife doesn’t sharpen a blade, it straightens it — realigning the edge and maintaining it in between longer and more involved sharpening sessions.
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