So.... Anyone ever try sharpening with two different grits each on different sides of the blade?? for example Left Side:200grit Right Side:100grit, LS:400 RS:200, LS:600 RS:400, LS:800 RS:600 and so on... would this work best only on asymmetrical blades (70/30)

has anyone else ever used the WEPS grit/stone progression of 600 grit, 14 micro on balsa, 800 grit, 10 micron on balsa, 1000 grit, 5 micron on leather, 3.5 micron on leather?? and what kind of results... I know its not traditional to switch between strop and stone but hey balsa is pretty tough and you're going to convex the bevel edge stropping anyways.

Any information or thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Happy sharpening:cheer:

I've never heard of maintaining an asymmetrical blade this way... I'm not sure how controlled this would be vs. other methods... you'd have to figure out how much metal a stone was removing in relation to the other. Probably not the best route.

For me, using stones then strops is a better route... I played with alternating when this came up before, but didn't work for me. Even though it may make sense looking at the grit/micron size, I'm guessing the fact that the spray/paste embeds into the leather/balsa, produces a finer result.

But that's the beauty of sharpening... experiment and find what works best for you!

That was a little confusing... I would think once the blade is profiled 70/30, you would (could) still sharpen it by using the standard method of same grit on both sides. Now if you were trying to take a 50/50 and reprofile to 70/30, I would still use the same grit stone, but increase the number of strokes on the 70% side, maybe 2:1 ratio, or just sharpen one side, and every once it a while knock off the burr on the other side.

Thanks, guys I appreciate the insight....

i'm only asking because I purchased a Masakage knife recently and this is what i was told...

"All Masakage knives are hand sharpened by Shibata san with his unique technique of using a different grit on each side of the blade. This gives a smooth, sharp edge that stays sharp longer than standard sharpening."

I found the use of two different grits an interesting technique.

I've only sharpened one knife using this technique and got reasonable results.... i'm just waiting till i can purchase a microscope to find out exactly what is happening at the apex-ed blade edge.

That makes more sense now; I think the way you'd implement that on a WE is that your FINAL grit would be different, e.g. sharpen to only 600 on one side, then continue to 1000 (or higher) on the other side. If you look at how a lot of serrated edges are cut/ground, they basically take a V-grind knife and cut the serrations into one side only; this is probably similar to his dual grit finish on a very macroscopic level? And if you take that serration process to a very microscopic level, it's another way to create a micro serrated edge.

To maximize the serrated capability, you'd want to sharpen the "rough" side at as close to a perpendicular angle as possible. But I wonder what the effect would be of making the scratch pattern 45 degrees to the perpendicular... either leading or trailing, I would think it would make either a push or pull cut more effective.

blacksheep25 wrote:


something like this? =)

Yes, Exactly Razor, but on a smooth straight edge. At a microscopic level it would look like the picture you posted. It does make a lot more sense to only do this towards the higher grits.

I really appreciate the thoughts on this subject

Let's split this up a bit. If you are sharpening at two different grits on the 2 sides of the knife, the symmetry or lack of it is a separate issue - unrelated. So you could do this on a symmetric or asymmetric grind.

I'm not quite sure what the advantage of this would be, but if you wished to go back and forth between compounds and stones in a progression, you could do it. Unorthodox, but I've done it.

So finally why would you do it? If you wanted a combination of toothy and refined why not do it the same way on both sides? I'm confused about what you are trying to achieve. Please clarify this and maybe I could come up with something.

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Ken

NicholasAngeja1 wrote:


Just wondering if it'll really be better then a standard sharpening??? Are master japanese blacksmith sharpeners really that far out there?

So I guess where I'm going with this is to explore what natural stones do and some thoughts regarding ideas of increased edge longevity using Japanese natural stones. You'll see how this relates to this topic in a bit.

Synthetic stones have a grit number assigned to it. So you might have a 2000 grit stone for instance. Natural stones don't have a grit number that can be assigned to them, even though people try to do it.
Synthetic stones usually have aluminum oxide as their abrasive (I'm leaving out details to keep from going off in tangents here). Depending on stone quality, these can be pretty precisely graded. The abrasive particles are more or les spherical in shape - cubes spheres polygonal shapes - and they stay that way. Naturals (Japanese by default)are a much more varied structure, with particles of different hardnesses and sizes and shapes. You might have particles shaped more like corn flakes. How do you measure the size of a cornflake - it's length width or thickness? Or it's surface textures? Now if this wasn't complex enoungh, what happens if you use these flakes and in the process of developing mud on the stone, the flakes break up into smaller flakes? Pretty complex.

So what is the result of this? It is a slurry that refines itself as you are using it! It gets finer with use.

So now we have a scratch pattern that contains various scratch patterns. Do you see where I'm going with this? Now you have an edge with various 'sizes' of 'teeth' so when you 'use up' teeth of one grit another level of teeth comes into play. Interesting stuff, isn't it? you don't get a single point of failure but rather a graded sequence of failures.

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Ken