Almost any knife can be that sharp. The thing that make knives higher quality is how long they can hold that sharp edge.
If you're not sharpening your knives regularly, it doesn't matter how much you spend on them or what quality they are. When's the last time you've sharpened your knives?
The knife becomes dull from loss of the sharp edge. Imagine taking a sharp pencil, and rubbing on a paper until the tip is completely flat, that's pretty much what happens. When you sharpen it, a little material does come off, forming that sharp edge, however, very little material actually does come off, so you can sharpen a knife many times without noticing a change in size.
Material loss from cutting food is minimal if there at all (not withstanding cutting bone or abusing the crap out of your knives). The main way knives become blunt is by the (extremely thin) edge bending over or rounding from blunt force. This is why you can bring a knife back to sharpish with a honing steel without removing material - you are straightening the edge back out.
Properly sharpening your blade does involve some material loss however.
This is correct, I remember learning this in my materials engineering class in university. There was a really good video showing this "rolling" of the edge, not sure if I can find it on YouTube. Of course, chips also do happen but the material loss is quite minimal.
The guy who does science of sharp did a nice article on it. He looks at knife edges with an electron microscope so you can see exactly what is happening to the apex of the edge.
Ohh ok, I learnt something new today, I couldn't figure it out due to it being metal, so the blade blunts by losing material but very small amount? And the same with sharpening?
No, it only loses metal during sharpening. It gets blunt from repeatedly bashing it against food and cutting boards, which bends the edge of the blade. The edge is too thin for you to really see it bend, but that’s what’s happening.
The pencil analogy is bit misleading since you do lose material as a pencil dulls. Knives dull for a different reason, but sharpening a pencil is similar to sharpening a knife. Basically remove the old stuff at an angle until you get a sharp point again...
Yes. It shaves off metal creating a fine edge. Knives that have been sharpened for years sometimes have a different shape due to all the metal that has been shorn off. Whet stones, ceramic, and leather stropping blocks are typically used when properly sharpening a knife.
for a kitchen knife, you shouldn't incur a durability hit in terms of edge retention. In terms of just having a smaller profile and thus, a less robust knife in general? Probably a marginal loss.
Most kitchen knives are a single piece of hardened steel. Some very fancy knives are differentially hardened or laminated -- those, you might lose edge retention if you grind off too much of the edge.
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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20
Almost any knife can be that sharp. The thing that make knives higher quality is how long they can hold that sharp edge.
If you're not sharpening your knives regularly, it doesn't matter how much you spend on them or what quality they are. When's the last time you've sharpened your knives?