Difference between machine and hand damage

Unlike the population in Europe, which has adopted machine sharpening as a generally accepted way of sharpening knives, the Japanese have a different approach. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, and it is up to you to decide which of the two best suits your needs.

When it comes to service sharpening, most crafters use machines that spin abrasives to remove the steel resulting in a sharper knife. Service sharpening using Japanese techniques like the one available in our shop is very, very rare in the world, but we'll talk more about that later. In most cases, the mentioned machines operate at a high number of revolutions, which impairs human work, but is also almost impossible for precise control. The lathe, for example, rotates at more than 3000 revolutions per minute, which is difficult for the human brain to process and often results in removing too much steel from the knife, changing its shape, appearance and degrading its performance. Therefore, the lifespan of your knife is significantly shortened, and if the craftsman is not the best at his job, you will often get a knife with worse performance than when you brought it to him. There is another problem here. Namely, many sharpening machines used by sharpeners do not have any cooling system, which leads to overheating of the blade, loosening of the hardness of the steel and permanent damage to the knife. Although this kind of knife feels sharp at first touch, the relaxed steel does not have the ability to hold its sharpness and protrudes the first time it is used. We will take the opportunity to hedge here, and say that there are rare craftsmen who know exactly what they are doing and use adequate machines to achieve adequate sharpening results. Unfortunately, there are fewer of them over time. The advantages of machine sharpening are definitely speed and price. A skilled craftsman sometimes needs less than a minute to sharpen a knife, which means that he can sharpen between 30 and 60 knives in an hour. Do the rest of the math yourself, but it's clear to you where the extremely affordable price of this type of sharpening comes from.

On the other hand, sharpening a knife by hand on a stone is significantly more difficult to master, information is more difficult to access and there are a lot of factors that can go wrong. The biggest challenge is mastering the muscle memory that will allow you to repeat the same movement over and over without a single change in angle or pressure. This is the key to success when hand sharpening on a stone. Some experienced knife makers and sharpeners from Japan state that sharpening and sharpening knives can be learned throughout your life, and there will always be more to learn. The next thing that is important to emphasize when it comes to stone sharpening, if you don't know exactly when and why you are doing something, it can take you up to an hour to sharpen just 1 knife. Another, relatively speaking, disadvantage of this method of sharpening is that if you want a professional to sharpen the knife for you on a stone, the price is up to several times more expensive compared to machine sharpening. However, this method also has a lot of advantages that make it more and more popular. By sharpening manually on a stone, you protect your knife and you can get the maximum potential out of it. Knives that are sharpened in this way are usually inherited. Furthermore, during the entire service life of the knife, its shape and appearance will hardly change at all.

If you decide to sharpen your knife yourself manually on a stone, we will write a little more about it in the following texts.