Wide Bevel Sharpening

I've often been asked why wide bevel sharpening is so expensive. I think this will help to show why.

The shiny sections in the before picture are from a flat diamond plate. The dark sections on the bevel show how the bevel is hollow ground with deep grooves remaining from the water wheel used during production.

We have the choice of either just sharpening at the little edge bevel or hitting the whole larger wide bevel on the stones. If we chose to hit the wide bevel to thin and/or make for flatter bevels or whatever we then have to decide to either leave the mess from the maker or keep on trucking with a flatten/thin of the bevel or maybe spread the work out and do the big work over several sharpening sessions. In my case I'm usually working on a customer's knife so once I go to the wide bevel I'm committed to seeing it through to the end. The difference between hitting just the edge bevel vs doing the whole wide bevel is usually many hours of work.

Stones used to fix the bevel were the ATOMA 140 diamond plate and the Beston 500x.

 

Just to understand: I think of hollow grind as something positive, exccept for the marks the wheel may leave. If you flatten it out, you will lose that hollow grind, right? Is that a trade-off or will the cutting performance be the same? Intuitively, I would think to use something like paper on felt in the hollow section to polish it up, but that is probably even crazier than what you are doing. In the end, I am clueless but curious...

Stefan

 

Hi Stefan, the hollow grind can be a positive for food release and not necessarily something we want to get rid of. The issue at hand comes when the edge gets thick and needs thinning because we must move up into the hollow like it or not and when we do we're often finding a mess that doesn't match up with our flat stones. We can either do the thinning and leave the ugliness for repair over time or we can dive in and fix it all at once. What's done is that the wide bevel is flattened down to the edge which thins out the edge but then we add in another convex grind at the bevel. Between the convex edge and the shinogi line we still have good food release, sometimes it's even better.

 

So am I right if I say that you are doing something like hamaguriba edge on both sides?

 

Yes sir!