What makes me a good knife sharpener?

I am often reminded by people who drop off knives of their encounters with those mobile sharpeners, the guys who picked up your knives, took them out to their van and then brought them back sharpened.  
What makes me think my method of sharpening is any better than those guys or why should I think that I can make your knives sharper than you have ever seen them before?

Is it just hype on my part because I want your business or is it something I truly believe.........yes it is something I truly believe.

I don't think I even need to talk about methods to explain myself, I am quite sure that anyone interested in sharpening understands/believes that the ultimate edge, the pinnacle of sharpness is achieved only by using whetstones. Now having a water stone is just a start, a good one, technique and ability to form that precise joining of two sides of knife joining at the apex is truly what defines the exact edge so to speak. That doesn't come easy and it takes a lot of practise and focus.

You can still get a knife screaming sharp of course without reaching the point of perfecting the edge, I don't know if anyone can actually do that with every single knife every time, I am sure that there are masters in Japan who can. Hell yeah :)

Remember the movie 300 where the guy tells Leonidas that he didn't bring as many warriors as he did and then Leonidas asked some of the other leaders soldiers what they did for a living and one was a Potter, one a Baker and so on. Then Leonidas asked his soldier what they did and they all said "fight" so their focus in life was directed solely on fighting, it's they thought about and cared about and it made them the ultimate badasses.

All I care about is knife sharpening.

Lets take McDonald's vs a fine dining restaurant like The Press Gang or daMaurizio just to name a couple, there are more yes like Chives Bistro but lets use The Press Gang for my purpose here.


You can eat at McDonald's and get satisfied, the meal is prepared by a 17 year old who doesn't really care about the customer, he/she is repeating a process taught to them that delivers the same product over and over about a billion times all over the world. The person behind the wheel has no invested interested in the food, they are just working to make a dollar and good for them, we need these places of course. This is not to criticise McDonald's, I am trying to compare fast food (fast sharpening) to
fine dining (precise sharpening)

Now at the Press Gang the Chef is perhaps plating a meal that he/she created and is extremely interested in what I think of the meal and his/her focus is on that meal, it has to be perfect or as best as he/she can do or they will lose business. This is a profession for that Chef, it's not a part time job to make some extra bucks.


I am not interested in anything but knife sharpening, hell even when I go on vacation I take my water stones and find a knife to sharpen for free. I'm driven and even though I know that in many cases my knives will be the sharpest knives the individual has used, I still fret about every knife, I still worry that the end product will not live up to the owners expectations and this is a process I put myself through every single day over and over.

It's awesome :)

So does this make me a better sharpener than the cook who sometimes gets around to sharpening their knife at the end of a shift or the guy who has a few oil stones in the shed and uses them on his knife once a year. Does it make me a better sharpener that professional sharpeners who use a machine to do the work?

YES.
(Now I do know of some folks who sharpen using belts and have the same passion that I do and they excel at sharpening)

What I am saying is that I sharpen well because it is something I am extremely passionate about and I  spend much of my time trying to improve upon my skills, discovering what creates a longer lasting edge, what grit cuts meat or oily fish better than others.

At the end of the day, I don't care if someone is a better sharpener than I am, I really don't, gees there very like many of them out there, I just care about what I do and I know that it is much more than just a means to make money, it is more than a hobby.

"You see I did bring more warriors than you did "


Until next time.