Abstract

The most common knives in the home are the kitchen knives. Yet too often these knives are not as sharp as they should be. Experts say that a sharp knife is a safe knife since it does it job easily and efficiently. So how can we bring this everyday knives up to a good cutting edge. Lets find out.

Knife Sharpening

In this talk I am going to focus on use a tool called a Work Sharp Mk.2. This is the current model sharpener from the company Work Sharp.

The tools is a belt sharpening tool. The idea is to use a sanding belt to grind away a small amount of the steel in the blade to sharpen the edge. The belts are interchangable allowing you to use different grits to do the sharpening. Normally you would use a medium grit for the initial sharping, and a fine grit for finishing the blade.

I am going to focus on the two common kitchen knives. The straight blade and the serrated blade. Lets start with a video showing the basic technique.

Basic knife sharpening

Serrated Knives

Now that we know how to sharpen a Serrated knive. Here is a page from the user guide that explains how to sharpen a serrated (Bread) knife.

Please note that some knives have an edge like a saw blade, not serrated. We can not sharpen these knives.

Sharpening Sissors

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Written by John F. Moore

Last Revised: Fri Jul 11 12:36:00 PM EDT 2025

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.