Keeping your knife sharp is important. But often you don’t have any sharpening tools to do so. Well, sharpening a knife doesn’t always need a tool. You can use a lot of other techniques to sharpen your knife. So, you should know how to sharpen a knife with household items?
Now, there are many other ways you can do such things. And today, we are going to discuss them in brief. You can easily use household items to sharpen your knife and use them instantly. After reading this article, you will know there are a lot of objects that can act as your sharpener.
Contents
Honing Vs Sharpening: Before Going to the Main Point
Just before going to the main point, we need to discuss honing and sharpening. Yes, both are different terms. And you have to use them for different purposes. Now, what makes both the terms different? We are going to give you a good idea about that here now:
Honing: Honing mainly means maintaining an edge that is already sharp.
Sharpening: Sharpening means repairing the edge of the knife to make it sharper.
Both these terms mainly focus on the edge. But the summary should give you a good idea about both these terms now.
How to Sharpen a Knife With Household Item?
Now, there are a lot of ways you can sharpen your knife. Here are some of the popular and effective ways to sharpen your knife at home.
How to Sharpen a Knife At Home With a Stone?
We know an actual sharpening tool is always going to provide better results. But this method works too. Now, here is a step by step guide on sharpening your knife using stones:
- First, you need to find a clean-looking rock.
- After finding the rock, you need to clean it with water even if it’s not dirty.
- Cleaning the rock will moisten it and help you sharpen your knife.
- Now, make sure you are putting your knife 10-degrees’ angle away from you.
- Now, stroke the blade over the surface of the rock. Try to cover the whole body of the knife.
- Repeat the same until your knife is sharp again.
How To Sharpen a Knife With Scissors?
If you are staying at home, and cannot find any other sharpener tool, just use a scissor. Well, using a scissor will work too. Use another sharp object to sharpen one tool. So, here are the steps to sharpen your knife using a scissor:
- You have to pay attention to the angle first. It should be placed between the handle of the scissors.
- Place the scissors at a 90-degrees angle. However, it should be around 70-degrees.
- Now, try to sharpen the edge.
How to sharpen a knife with sandpaper?
The sandpaper technique is probably not an efficient way to sharpen your knife. But the roughness of your sandpaper can always help you sharpen any knife. Here are the tricks to do so:
- First, mound the sandpaper in a block of wood. Try to mound the sandpaper in a rectangular block. Try to keep the sandpaper above the surface.
- Spill some water over the sandpaper first.
- The process of holding your paper is just like the way you would do with a rock.
- Depending on how much sandpaper you have, try to cover the full body of your knife.
- Repeat the same thing until you consider it to be sharp.
How to sharpen a knife at home with a sharpener?
You can use a manual sharpener to sharpen your knife at home. This may look tricky at times. However, the process is not that hard. You can easily use the manual sharpener to sharpen your knife. Here are the main tricks to do so:
- When you are using a sharpener, set it to a ‘coarse setting’ to sharpen a blunt knife. Try to set it between ‘coarse’ and ‘fine’.
- Now, you have to pull the blade through the base 3-6 times.
- Follow the contour of your blade.
- You have to run the blade 2 or 3 times in the ‘fine setting’.
- After doing so, rinse the blade with water and wipe the blade using a towel.
- You can maintain the knife daily using the ‘fine setting’
- Better use electric sharpener for the expensive knife.
- The pull-through handheld sharpener is also another good option.
- You can even use whetstone for better output.
Angle Grinder for Knife Sharpening & Knife Making
We all know definite angles are the best for definite metals and also jobs. However, for kitchen knives, it is not always about sharpness. The cleaner the edge, the sharper it gets.
Also, it blunts quicker. Well, you can put a produced angle below the grinder. For a high-quality knife, you have to follow the rules and precision angles. An angle grinder for knife sharpening & knife making is not an uncommon thing. Most of the quality table knife comes with cheap quality metal.
This is obviously a bad thing but still, they are not that expensive. On the other hand, an angle grinder can help you sharpen your knife. You can easily go for the 80-degrees sharpening with the angle grinder.
An 80-degree grinding means crushing an angle about 40 degrees is to the edge on every side. It doesn’t mean you have to grind 80-degrees. So, yes, this is obviously a good opportunity for you.
The majority of the grinding will take your time on reshaping the knife. For sharpening, you need a little bit of groundwork to do. If the edge of your knife is damaged, you will need to grind that part.
In this case, using a motorized grinder is always going to save you tons of time. Grinders can easily help you create a good quality knife. And you can select the type of metal you want. This is obviously a great way to reform your knife or just create one using any metal you prefer.
Easy Knife Sharpening Tricks
There are a lot of tricks you can follow to sharpen your knife. Well, sharpening your knife is not that hard. For sharpening your knife, you can use multiple things. Among these things, some of the most interesting ones are:
- Nail file
- Car window glass
- The spine of another knife
- Concrete
You can also use some simple tricks to solve your knife sharpening problems. Here are some of them discussed here:
- You can check the sharpness of your knife using a piece of paper. Just try to run the knife over your paper. If the paper cuts swiftly, your knife is sharp.
- Use your thumbnail to test the sharpness.
- You can use the bottom side of your mug to sharpen your knife if you don’t have any sort of stones inside the house.
Final Words
Well, sharpening a knife is not easy. So, it is very important for you to know about how to sharpen a knife with household items. However, table knives are relatively easier to handle. You can easily detect the problems and maintain them.
We have talked about some of the popular options here. But you can use some tricks to sharpen your knife. Hopefully, now you can sharpen your table knife perfectly. We only tried to talk about the methods here. Going for a full tour guide was not possible. But hopefully, this guide can help you get a good grip on the whole topic.
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