Coarse Edges On Various Knives
- Utility kitchen knife from Global knives. Major user in my kitchen, and that
guy sees the most sharpening of all my
kitchen knives.
Made of
CROMOVA 18 stainless steel and hardened around 56-58HRC. One thing I like
about Japanese knives, is that they try to keep hardness high compared to their European and American counterparts. Of course customs don't count. There's few specific reasons for
that, but not relevant to this macro photos anyway. 58HRC is ok, but 56HRC is quite low for a Japanese kitchen knife that's considered hi end. That's my humble opinion. Other
Japanese makers spec kitchen knives 59-60HRC or even higher. Tojiro for example does 62 HRC. So, as I have already stated I prefer rough edges on kitchen knives, save for Santoku
that is used mainly for push cutting. Obviously utility knife does a lot of slicing. So the standard recipe for sharpening GS-1 is mousepad/sandpaper. And the grit of the sandpaper
is as usual 600. Used for routine maintenance and touchups. Once in a while when the blade gets seriously dull (although I never let it to get real dull) I start with 220, then
400. For a while I've experimented with 220 grit edge only, but eventually decided that 600 was the best choice at least for my uses. Not too smooth, but not too rough either, and
sharp enough. Very low grit doesn't produce high sharpness levels in other words.
So, the edge looks satin finish, and to unarmed eye it
looks like this. Now for the "armed" eye the picture is different :) On the first
picture you can see the mid section of the blade. At 32x magnification you can clearly see rough edge, nice dent to the left side, pores formed from frequent sharpening at the edge
base and other interesting details. On the second picture the you see the same edge, but closer to the tip. Lighting was different, so colors are slightly off, but still the same
blade, same edge, same 32x magnification. Satin finished blade looks quite textured, and not as smooth as other satin finished blades you've seen on other pages in this section.
Although it's very smooth visually and to touch.
- One of the oldest field knives in my collection. And if you read its review linked in
the beginning of this paragraph you'll get the idea through what sort of use and abuse this blade went through.
Yet it's still alive and gong strong. A2 steel after all. And so far the only A2 specimen in our macro gallery. As you can see from the
picture to the left, which is 30x magnification the knife has been through a lot of work. PJ II was never sharpened on mousepad. Always V edge for it. Although double beveled edge.
you can clearly see primary and secondary bevels on this picture. The difference in color is because of the light reflection differences at different angles. Nothing else, it's not
a tamper line or anything like that. Rather large dent you see in the mid-section is the result of unexpected contact of the edge with the nail. Nail was defeated eventually. I
just had to cut it once I realized what was going on, but the dent was left as a result of initial impact. Later I used batoning to cut through that nail. And one more thing worth
noticing. Look at the Kalgard coating. That thing is tough. After all those years and use it's still holding strong. Yeah, it's scratched and beat up, but nowhere on the blade it's
worn to the bare metal.
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