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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Don't buy dumb electronic kitchen gadgets.

Get a good steel knife, learn how to sharpen it properly, and you're set for life.

In particular, you don't need expensive stones, guides or lapping systems to do it. An aliexpress-grade 3000/8000 waterstone, a flattening stone and a strop will get most knives shaving the hairs off your arm for under £20 all-in.

The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.

Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.

Just don't use a sharpener with the carbide v-blades that shave off slivers of metal or you'll get a knife with a concave edge that doesn't meet the board along the whole length and that really is a pain to fix (related note on that, a kitchen knife edge up in a vice is quite a disconcerting thing!).

Why? Your hands don't work?

They are really not that hard, especially if they come with the bit with the right angle.

>> Why? Your hands don't work?

That’s quite rude and unnecessary.

To answer the question, there is an infinite number of things I can do with my time. Learning that particular manual skill, especially when there is a very simple alternative, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.

Rude? Just asking because 10min to sharpen a knife every 3-6 months is not that big of a commitment, unless your hands don't work properly.

I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.

Sharpening knives is quite the therapeutic process, at least it was for me when I learned to do them. Now I can sharpen knives at the bottom of a tea cup or even a brick.

3000/8000 is a bad one. Both are way way way too fine. I'd very much like anything similar to 300/1200 + strop or so. I can shave with that.

Also I'd not use a soaking whetsone {anymore} (my spouse resents them for being that messy).

300/1200 is too coarse for AUS10. 3000/8000 is too mild (perhaps better for finishing). I suggest 1000/3000(or 6000).

I use the 300 only if the knives are too dull or I want to change the apex to 20 degrees. Honing them back is just the 1200 and a strop. Like mentioned I can shave with that. 3000 is overkill imo, unless you are looking for the mirror finish.

Never heard it would be too fine for some steel. 300 is for creating a new edge or fixing chips or otherwise broken edge, 1000 and 3000-4000 is enough for maintaining a chefs knife. And if you can't get a knife sharp on 1000 you need to fix your technique.

I agree. The industry standard for a great, boring, durable and surprisingly cheap knife is the Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife 20 cm.

I agree. My experience: I bought some basic sharpening stones and watched some youtube and have had pretty good results with my basic japenese chef knives (~$100-150) that I've had for 15 years. It's 5 minutes of work every month or two for me. This product doesn't make sense to me for the price point. The aesthetics look really poor.

The entire argument in the thread about how to best sharpen a knife is why people don't bother learning how to sharpen knives.

Like holy shit, I'm just going to pay someone a few dollars to do it because I don't want to bother sorting out all of the contradictory advice!

Maybe it’s dumb. But the video seems convincing. Ultrasonic knives are also used in some industrial and medical settings. So the concept does work. And the inventor of this one worked at Sansaire, Anova, and other kitchen hardware places. So they have a lot of credibility producing real products.

Of course, still need to sharpen, though.

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