A sharp knife's a good knife

When Debbie and I got married (9 years ago this Wednesday) we got lots of presents, as is traditional. One of the presents we got was a voucher for a shop where we ended up getting a knife block with lots of knives. We still have them and it's a very useful thing to have picked up. A few years ago I was a little frustrated with the state of the knives. We'd bought a 50c chef's knife from the Warehouse which was hella sharp and easy to sharpen. The more expensive knives were heavier, thicker bladed, and didn't seem to sharpen up so well using a steel.

Then I bought some chisels to fix up a door latch. They came with a sharpening stone. I used it to sharpen the old knives and they were reborn, sharper and more durable than ever before!

There were two things I had been doing wrong in my previous efforts to sharpen them:

1. Using a steel to try to sharpen a knife.
2. Drawing the blade along the steel backwards, instead of forwards.

Here's sharpeningsupplies.com's explanation of what a steel does:

Contrary to popular belief, a sharpening steel does not sharpen a knife, instead the purpose of a steel is to align the edge of the knife. As a knife is used, the edge will become curled. While you can't see the curl with the naked eye, a microscope reveals that the edge is askew. The tiny microscopic fibers bend over and dull the edge of the knife. The sharpening steel will straighten or re-align these fibers. Regular steeling is recommended. The more often you steel, the longer the sharp edge will last. Steeling is an effective way to help maintain your knife's edge between sharpenings. Eventually though your knife will become dull and need to be sharpened.

Which would explain why I wasn't having much success sharpening a big knife with a steel.

It turns out sharpening a knife with a sharpening stone is pretty easy, quick, and best of all effective. Not only did a dull chef's knife become useful for cutting meat again, it can slice a tomato like nobody's business :-)