By most of us, I do mean the vocal minority. Those of us obsessed with edges and posting on this and other forums. Those people who get home, dull a knife and put it to the stones for "fun". Us crazy people. Not the average cook, chef or even sharpener. I can not speak for those who do not share their experiences here or even for those who do but I think for those who do it is at least slightly easier to gauge.Lepus wrote: ↑Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:49 am By definition we cannot mostly be B grade sharpeners unless knife people who are not active on forums are bringing down the average a good bit, but some of them are quite decent. My most knife conscious coworkers sharpen frequently because they needs to do so and are only a few steps back from me with regard to getting a good edge, though they have not spent much time exploring different stones or on single bevels. I don't hover over their equipment every day but they do understand the root of the process and sharpen often enough to get sharp knives. They are all what I would label tier 2 sharpeners, able to maintain their own knives well without many mistakes.
How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
- Kit Craft
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
After reading this whole thread, I've decided it's useless for me to think in terms of a grade or a scale.
I can sharpen my knives, all with 50-50 edges, without scratching. And I can get them as sharp if not sharper than any OOB edge I've encountered. It doesn't really matter what grade it is to me. It's good enough for now.
Can I get a lot better? Of course. I've only been doing this for two years. One telltale sign: I am less confident sharpening someone else's knife than I am my own.
I expect to get better over time. Repetition and learning. I still watch videos and read most of the threads on this part of the forum. Live and learn and don't worry about the rest.
I can sharpen my knives, all with 50-50 edges, without scratching. And I can get them as sharp if not sharper than any OOB edge I've encountered. It doesn't really matter what grade it is to me. It's good enough for now.
Can I get a lot better? Of course. I've only been doing this for two years. One telltale sign: I am less confident sharpening someone else's knife than I am my own.
I expect to get better over time. Repetition and learning. I still watch videos and read most of the threads on this part of the forum. Live and learn and don't worry about the rest.
Jeffry B
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Jeffry, I agree. I am content with what I can do and will continue to learn at my own pace. I really don't ever NEED to be better than I am now to get by in the kitchen. Honestly, for huge repair jobs like turning a broken gyuto to a petty, I would be just as happy sending that off to someone else. I like to sharpen for the nuances but repair is another matter. Kind of like with a car, I can change my oil but I have no desire to rebuild the engine...
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Hmmm... I think we all have been in a class where almost everybody got an A, and also a class where an A was unreasonablly withheld just because the professor or teacher decided to make it elite. Graders are human and vary quite a bit even within the same study. Two different graders can give completely different grades concerning the exact same paper, even though both have been deemed as worthy to grade.
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
I have been in class A a few times but never class B that I can recall. I have had a few classes where A's were harder to achieve because the teacher/professor was preoccupied with some other aspect of life but it was still obtainable. Heh, we will not get started on that.
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
The average person would have been bored to death of this thread. The fact that all of us read this and/or participate says something about us. We are knife and sharpening geeks(meant in the most loving of ways) or perhaps cutlery scholars. You could almost compare it to scholars amongst scholars. You might compare us to a group of English professors discussing Shakespeare. For example, anyone in the NBA is among the elite U.S basketball players concerning percentage. They may never even get off the bench, but still among the greatest players in the world concerning percentage, easily with in the top %10. But among them you will have all stars, hall of famers, and the greatest players ever.
It is tricky to develop a grading system, but you would have to have hard points of reference like the ones suggested here. And they would have to be standard. But you could create an actual system that would allow people to grade themselves or even others (at times) to critique one's work. Since this thread has created much enthusiasm and interest. It might be interesting to actually develop an agreed upon scale at least by the majority.
It is tricky to develop a grading system, but you would have to have hard points of reference like the ones suggested here. And they would have to be standard. But you could create an actual system that would allow people to grade themselves or even others (at times) to critique one's work. Since this thread has created much enthusiasm and interest. It might be interesting to actually develop an agreed upon scale at least by the majority.
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
This is perhaps my favorite line so far.
Of course we don't "need" to put ourselves on a scale—not at all. In fact, I think that, for most of us, even thinking in terms of grades or a scale is frankly UNPRODUCTIVE at best. However, if the [OP] question is how we rank our sharpening skills relative to others, and the OP specifically references grades, it does seem worth battling with the topic, even if "rejecting" the scale is part of that battle. I just prefer a rejection of the scale than a distortion of it, since it is a stable, well-defined part of the lexicon.
I work very hard at my job and at many other things, but I have to admit, I take pleasure in NOT working very hard at sharpening in the same way. I just don't have the resources yet. So, I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy doing it as much as I can without wearing out my knives...but I am not one of those people who worries about how I compare with others while I'm doing it. I'm much more concerned with whether or not I am getting a genuine experience of the knife in question, or if somehow, or for some reason, my edge is actually getting in the way of the performance of the blade.
Many of my blades are worth a lot of money (not necessarily because they are rare, but because the people who made them are good enough to charge a lot of money for their work). I do feel a little anxiety about my ability to sharpen these blades, as it seems a bit disrespectful to put a bad edge on them that inhibits their performance or design. Sure, they're now "mine," and I can break them if I want, yada yada yada, but that isn't my style. The point is this isn't about my own freedoms or my ownership, it is my desires: I want them to perform as they were designed to perform. This is a scale that is much more difficult to define, and I'm not sure it is a "relative" scale, either...it feels much more like an absolute scale: you either get it right, or you don't. There isn't one way to get it right, of course, but out of those many ways, there are those that do not inhibit the knife, and then there are those that do...I'm not sure there is an in-between, nor a relative scale, for this particular achievement.
This is just another way of answering the complex OP question. I say this because another part of that post was "room for improvement," and to me, sensing there is "room for improvement" relates to the other half of sharpening; that is, the observational side, in which one senses that the knife can take more, do more, achieve more, than what it is currently capable of with its current edge.
~J
Comments: I'm short, a home cook, prefer lighter, thinner blades, and have tried dozens of brands over the years.
Comments: I'm short, a home cook, prefer lighter, thinner blades, and have tried dozens of brands over the years.
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
To clarify I do think using the scholastic grading system is a workable idea. It is a particularly well understood scale, including the use of lower grades. There is stigma attached to low grades, but in this context there shouldn't be. Even being a D grade sharpener is somewhat impressive. It might be hurt by its nature in lacking concrete objective elements because no one is grading all our work, so without some data on lower level sharpening it is pretty vague.
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Speaking of rating sharpening skills, we have used the 0-10 scale from SteveG more than once and that got me thinking: what is the best he has rated an edge? The highest I have ever seen him give an edge was an 8 and that was to a 240 T-F nashiji.
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
On any report card, grades are broken down into categories. (e.g., History: B+, Algebra: A-, Civics: B). Maybe a similar, more nuanced approach would be better. Something like this list:
- Putting a useful edge on any knife, without regard for aestetics (i.e., scratches on the blade, etc...): Grade
- Creating a useful edge on any knife, with aestetics (no scratches, kasumi finish, etc...): Grade
- Ability to understand when/how to thin a knife: Grade
- Ability to set complex bevels: Grade
(I'm a total beginner, so I wouldn't be an authority on the specifics of each category, but I think the concept could be helpful)
- Putting a useful edge on any knife, without regard for aestetics (i.e., scratches on the blade, etc...): Grade
- Creating a useful edge on any knife, with aestetics (no scratches, kasumi finish, etc...): Grade
- Ability to understand when/how to thin a knife: Grade
- Ability to set complex bevels: Grade
(I'm a total beginner, so I wouldn't be an authority on the specifics of each category, but I think the concept could be helpful)
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Can someone explain the SteveG scale? Is it all relative? Based on data? I am not trying to be rude about it, but I just want to learn. Thanks
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
No idea, Ben. Dude has handled hundreds of knives though so I know he has seen about every kind of the edge there is.
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
No problem, I can understand if it is all based on experience. The more I can understand by asking questions the faster I can improve myself.
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
I asked Steve about his ratings on the old forum.
https://www.chefknivestogoforum.com/oot ... 12664.html
https://www.chefknivestogoforum.com/oot ... 12664.html
Jeffry B
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Kind of amazing that this thread is still going. I like the academic grade scale, but it is important to understand that in academics there are different levels. So, when my 5 year old comes home with a gold star, that means a different absolute level of achievement than when I send an integral calculus student home with an A on an exam (rare, maybe 5% of grades). With this in mind, there is room for me to look at myself as a C student (sort of elementary school-ish) and for our local experts to also consider themselves C students (professorial level). There are so many things that I can't or haven't done that it isn't really possible to put myself on the same grading scale as others, but what I can do I'm pretty happy with. So C+ grade there. An expert might make the same statement, but they are referring to an entirely different skill set that they are evaluating.
- Kit Craft
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
I dunno, some of those gold star students seem to have an innate ability to be better at everything than most people from day one. I grew up with a few of those people and they seem to be able to do everything pretty damn well! Like, first knife and first stone and they put this kasumi on a knife that makes you cry and want to sell off all of your rocks...Just an example.
I get your point though and it is a good one.
I get your point though and it is a good one.
Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
Using the classroom and grading system, I think of it like this:
I get an A-plus if this is a sharpening 101 class. A B if it's "intermediate knife sharpening" and a C- if it's "knife sharpening master class."
I get an A-plus if this is a sharpening 101 class. A B if it's "intermediate knife sharpening" and a C- if it's "knife sharpening master class."
Jeffry B
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Re: How do you rate your own sharpening skills?
I think Jeffry is on the right track here if we want to get into it that far. However, if we go that far why not go all the way and define what a sharpener is? Don't people like Shibata, Kasahara, Kurosaki (Makoto) and many others rough grind as well as finish sharpen? Are both positions considered part of being a sharpener or is one considered something else? I don't think most of us do much rough work like grinding a smiths blank into a knife. Custom makers excluded of course.