A Complete Guide to Sharpening Your Knives with a Whetstone

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Been carrying and using the same knives for most of your adventures?

While your love for your blades is completely justified, over time your knives might go somewhat blunt.

Solution to this?  Well, it’s right here. This post will tell you how you can sharpen your favourite blades like a pro!

How to Sharpen your Knife Blade with a Whetstone?

While a number of equipments for sharpening knives are available out there, a whetstone is one of the oldest and easiest of all.

All you need to do is know the right thing. Keep the following guidelines in mind and pick a Sunday when you’d want to enjoy the sun brushing your blade against the magical whetstone, so it gets better and beyond.

First things first, keep it dry

Before you do anything, you need to make sure that the whetstone that you are going to use is dry.

Okay. Why does it have to be that way?

• Using oil or water on a whetstone traps tiny metal particles in the liquid. This can produce ragged edges.
• While some whetstones are still okay to wet, most of them will just be impossible to use when made wet with any oil or water.

So, your best bet is to keep your whetstone dry. This will enable it to sharpen all kinds of knives, whether you own the best kitchen knives uk or a normal pocket blade.

Steps to Sharpen your Knives with a Whetstone?

While a whetstone is useful for sharpening knives of all kinds, before you move ahead you need to know the actual procedure. Which, in the following section has been broken down into 6 easy steps.

1. Place the whetstone on a cutting board with its coarse grit’s face up and a wet paper towel below it. This will prevent the stone from sliding.
2. Hold the knife handle and place its edge against the stone. Do it in such a way that the cutting edge meets the stone at an angle of around 22-degree.

   Do it with one hand. The second hand can be used to stabilize the blade.

3. With moderate pressure, slide the blade forward and across the whetstone, covering the blade’s entire length.

   Also, keep flushing the blade against the stone constantly at an angle of 22-degree.

4. Do this 10 times on one side. And then flip the knife over to give the other side of the blade 10 strokes on the whetstone.

   This will ensure that the blade’s both edges are sharp.

5. Flip the whetstone over to the other side and give each side of the blade 10 strokes.
6. Use a sharpening steel to hone the blade. Finish off by rinsing and wiping the blade dry to remove any metal particles (if there).

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Final words

While there are a number of ways to sharpen your knives’ blades, a whetstone is the most traditional of all of those. But then, its usage might require some guidelines.

In this post, you read about those guidelines only. Like why it’s important to keep the whetstone dry. Why it can’t be used when wet? What are the steps to use? And how you can prevent any metal losses.

Hopefully this article helped you find something useful.

If you still have doubts, don’t hold back. Reach out to us or better share this piece with your knife lover friends. It will help.