Hey, was wondering if anybody might have any tips for me! I’ve been using a Worksharp Knife & Tool Sharpener MK2, and have this weird issue where my knives are coming out sharper on one side than the other.
I know that shouldn’t really make any sense, but I’ve got a knife right now that I have no problem shaving hairs off my arm with, but only with one side. If I flip it over, no matter what angle I approach with, I can’t knock away a single hair. The bevel is also significantly wider on one side, which I also can’t figure out how to correct but I’m sure is related.
I can’t tell if this has anything to do with the fact that the belt rubs against the steel in different directions when sharpening each side (up and into the blade on the left side, down and away from the blade on the right), or if perhaps this might be an error in technique on my part. As far as I can tell, I’m keeping the blade in line with the guides properly and not deviating significantly.
For what it’s worth, I’m working with a hawkbill blade. Meaning that I have to lower the knife as I draw it through the sharpener, to keep contact with the belt. I know this allows for a lot of room for error; I’ve been making an effort to ensure that I’m keeping the alignment correct the whole time, but it’s wholly possible that this may be where I’m messing something up.
Any ideas if I might be doing something wrong or something I could try to get a more even edge on both sides?
I will say this about your edge appearing to have uneven thickness from one side versus the other. Two things may contribute to that. The easy one, or at least the one you should be hoping for, is that you’re not holding the knife at the same angle when you’re grinding it on the left side versus the right. The Work Sharp belt sharpener isn’t foolproof, and I haven’t found the guides on mine to be very good. It still takes a decent bit of technique to get a consistent edge out of it, and even then it’s highly dependent on the bevel on your knife.
So option 2 is that the grind on your knife isn’t true. Not the edge, which is easy to deal with, but the actual taper from where it’s flat to where the cutting edge starts. That’s not uncommon on cheap knives, and it’ll exacerbate problem #1, above, if you can’t compensate for it. It’s hard to eyeball but you can suss it out with a digital caliper or a micrometer and a straight edge, if you’re careful. If that’s the case, it’ll never be right. You can make the apex of the edge true to the centerline of the blade, and with a decent guided sharpening jig you probably will. But it’ll always visibly look like it has more meat on one side than the other, because it does.
If I were you, I would reserve the belt sharpener for edge angle reprofiling or heavy duty un-fucking of a blade that’s got major nicks or chips in it. I have one, and I haven’t found it to be a good general purpose sharpening solution. I much prefer my Work Sharp guided bench stone or, ideally, my Spyderco Sharpmaker for actual decently precise sharpening of any of my knives that I give a fuck about. The belt sharpener will leave a major burr on your edge, and it’ll always tend to leave the same burr on the same side because as you have correctly observed the abrasive passes over the edge in one direction on one side and the opposite direction on the other, and it isn’t a tool very well suited to knocking that burr off. You always wind up having to finish it with a regular stone if you want to wind up with a decent finished job, and it always takes more work on one side than the other.
And this is coming from a bird who uses a fucking Harbor Freight belt sander to grind swords and bush choppers, machetes, axes, and mower blades. Such things have their place in the world, but fine cutlery usually isn’t it. When belt sharpening, you always want to have the abrasive moving from the edge back towards the spine, which when you’re freehanding on a belt sander you can do easily by just flipping the blade over. Not so on the Work Sharp.
Thanks for the advice! I think the Sharpmaker may end up being my next purchase. I’m working with N690 steel; would you recommend using the stones that come with the base model, or should I be looking at one of their alternate stones?
I always recommend having a pair of the diamond stones on hand because otherwise the two ceramic ones it comes with are so fine it can take a month of Sundays if you ever need to rework some blade or other into either of the Sharpmaker’s two built in angles. It can take a lot of time but if you finish with the white stones it comes with you can make things ridiculously sharp with it.