JAPANESE KNIFE - First Time Sharpening Your New Knife ! 

haha! Woah, not sure why name calling is necessary. As the title implies, this video is more to get beginners in the right mindset , If you're interested in an actual sharpening video we have many others on our channel which I would recommend checking out! Thanks for the comment.

@@SharpKnifeShop Nah i was waiting for you to show us the stone. This shit is clickbait and i have adhd . thunbs down

@@elo0326 shouldn’t use adhd as an excuse for being an idiot

@@samuel1469 who hurt you 😂

@@elo0326 could say the same

The most important thing Gage said was, that you really can't screw up beyond repair. Take your time and check often. I tell people to use a red marker on the edge bevel to help see what is happening. But, you'd really have to work to "ruin" a knife.

thank you so much!! Hope you enjoy them, happy sharpening!

Half the journey in furthering you sharpening skills is fixing the mistakes of the first few tries....we'll at least thats how I learned

Great to hear!

Our pleasure, that things a monster, have fun with it!

We will have a lot of fun with it. I already like the length but the height will be a new experience 😊. My bride is very used to cleavers so it will be interesting to she what she thinks. It is our first blue #2 steel and that will be fun to use. Also the pakka wood is a new handle type for us. Right now we know ho wood so this another new adventure. Again many thank yous!

There's nothing you can do that we can't fix so don't stress! just watch out for the bevels as repolishing them can be time consuming and it will look good, but never the same! If youre super worried just give it some back strokes for a while on a high grit and see where it leaves you!

Well said!

Let us know how it goes/if you have any issues!

Hey man! Being self aware of the issue is great, it means you're paying attention to the feedback which is important. However if your tilting the knife its possible that you aren't applying enough pressure to the knife on the higher grit stones. We tell people to lighten up and we do as well, but I never press so light that the knife has a chance to tilt off the side of the stones. Try a little more pressure then finish off with a little more time on very slow and steady backstrokes. Let me know if that helps or if you have any more questions!

In my experience harder stones are usually the pricier of the bunch, that being said everyone has their personal preference between soft and hard stones. There will be some minor differences as well which is how close to the actual grit they are, the consistency of the slurry, the size of the stone (both height and weidth/length) but hardness is the biggest factor. While softer stones build a slurry quicker, and therefor seem to cut faster, they also need to be flattened more frequently and wear away quicker so its more of a trade off than an improvement. I prefer medium hardness stones for sharpening and harder stones or polishing bevels, because your stone needs to be dead flat for polishing so less time flattening wins that category.

Thanks Ether!

If your knives are in good enough shape to touch up on a 3k I see no issues with this whatsoever. We find for very beginner sharpeners however that it can be difficult to hold a consistent angle for an extended period of time so using a quicker cutting stone will heed better results. But I very frequently spend a little longer than I need to on just the 5k to touch up my knives and while it isnt the most time efficient it works just as well if you can be consistent over the longer period of time.

Awesome thank you for the info!

Thats a great tip!

We carry them when we can get our hands on them! I've been eyeing a 210 Yo Gyuto to come home with me one of these days

I would highly recommend that you give it a try. I am super happy with my 240 nashiji gyuto (and 135 nashiji petty) with wa handle. It was actually a 210 maboroshi yo gyuto my father had bought that turned me on to TF in the first place. I love the perfectly imperfect finish on that knife. It has more character than any knife I've seen since. Not to mention the quality and heat treatment of the shirlgami #1 of course 😁😉

I wouldn't worry about thinning the secondary bevels when you are just a beginner. It is something that helps the overall cutting feel of the knife, doesn't effect sharpness per say. Thinner blade just slides through a bit better than a thicker wedge. But if this is a relatively new knife that hadn't been used and sharpened away for months/years, it should still be thin enough behind the edge for this to not be a problem at all. And the scratches you formed on the side of the blade are kinda tough to remove. The best, yet quite tidious way would be to use progressively finer and finer sand paper moving in a single direction along the blade, starting quite rough and going finer, possibly into some fine grit paste. Or, you could just call those scratches 'knife's personal character' and leave them there 😄

@@MultiBamb00cha oh wow, and I thought if I kept at it I could buff off the scratches. It’s totally fine cuz they cut great and that’s way more important than the “character” they now have. Great lesson and thanks for the lesson!

You beat me to it and said everything I was gunna say!

so sorry for the late reply! Our chart assumes you're using your knife daily for about 30 mins (more for home cooks) If you're a professional using your knife more regularly, 2-3 hours of chopping a day, I would move all the times lines up a stone, So after a week in a pro kitchen you'll likely need to use a 1000 grit stone to get it sharp.

@@SharpKnifeShop Where can we find this chart please?

Well, how did it go?!

@@SharpKnifeShop pretty good actually! I started off with an old Zwilling Santoku instead of my first and until now only japanese knife and I actually managed to get it really sharp. It passed the tomato test with a solid B I'd say. I shredded through some cabbage with it today and the only problem I have now is that the first third is fairly dull again now. Should I just touch it up on the 6k side of my 1k/6k stone? I tried to strop it on newspaper after I sharpened it yesterday and somehow it felt way less sharp after that. Did I maybe mess that up?

Hey Steve, always ceramic on Japanese! You want the material of the hone to be harder than what you're honing. Steel rods can be used very gently in a pinch but the knives being so much harder can bite into them and chip!

@@kroodle8 i thought as much

Im unsure what you mean, if the knife is high carbon absolutely hone it, hone any knife. If the honing rod is a high carbon I cant say Ive ever used one of those before but I prefer ceramic rods to any steel ones Ive ever used.

@@SharpKnifeShop honing with honing stick was what I was asking. Sometime ago when I bought my first knife. The guy told me honing stick increases chances of chipping, due to the nature of the material, especially ceramic. He also explained that high carbon’s edge don’t “bend” like stainless steel. (Honing steel was designed to “straighten” stainless steel bevel). Using honing stick is counter productive. He suggested strop or polish stone if I have to do touch ups.

You need to go down to a lower grit, especially on cheap soft knives. The grind is often quite bad towards the heel on cheaper knives as well, and most people use the heel of a knife either more, or more roughly so it could be that it takes a little more love to bring that part back. Im sure a quick couple passes on a 220 or 320 would melt away material and form a quick burr from tip to heel!

Im normally not a first called but i couldn't resist...

Great starting point for people new to sharpening!

Stay sharp, bitch

You may want something a little more coarse for when it comes time to thin, but otherwise if you take good care of/sharpen often enough you don't need to go any lower!