How we sharpen your knife. And why.

How and Why We Sharpen Your Knife

Sharpening a knife sounds relatively simple. Remove a little steel from each side until the two surfaces meet and you have a sharp edge.

But making a knife sharp and sharpening a knife correctly are two very different things.

At Blade & Butler, over a century of sharpening experience has taught us that every knife needs to be treated individually. Steel, blade thickness, taper, bevel geometry, intended use, previous sharpening and damage all determine how we approach your knife.

We Sharpen the Knife, Not Just the Edge

Before sharpening, we assess the overall geometry of your blade.

As knives are repeatedly sharpened, the cutting edge gradually moves upwards into thicker steel. Eventually, simply sharpening the very edge isn't enough. You can create an edge that initially feels extremely sharp, but the blade immediately behind it may be too thick to pass efficiently through food.

This is why around 40% of the knives arriving at our workshop require some degree of thinning.

Where necessary, we reduce the steel behind the cutting edge and create a wider bevel to restore an efficient cutting angle. It's an important distinction between simply putting an edge on a knife and properly servicing one with love, care and attention to its needs.

We Sharpen by Hand

Every knife is sharpened individually by hand on our custom-made, water-cooled aluminium-oxide sharpening wheels. We don’t use clamps. We use muscle memory. Handed down generations.

The principle is fundamentally the same as sharpening on a whetstone: an abrasive meets the steel at a controlled angle and removes material to create a new bevel.

The difference is efficiency.

Our enormous water-cooled wheels allow our experienced sharpeners to create the required geometry quickly and precisely, water continuously controls the temperature of the blade and the ultra smooth abrasives gently and slowly create the new edge.

The wheel doesn't decide the angle.

The person holding your knife does.

There Is No Universal Sharpening Angle

We don't believe every knife should be sharpened identically.

A delicate Japanese sashimi slicing knife doesn't require the same geometry as a heavy European cleaver. A boning knife, Santoku, carving knife and small utility knife all perform different jobs.

Blade thickness matters too.

We therefore select the bevel and angle according to the individual knife and what that knife was designed to do guided by the manufacturers specifications.

Single bevel knives remain single bevel. Double bevel knives remain double bevel. We even sharpen niche asymmetric bevelled knives too. Where additional strength is required towards the heel, we can adjust the geometry accordingly.

We Correct What Years of Use Have Done

Sharpening is also an opportunity to correct problems that have developed during the knife's life.

Broken tips can be reshaped. Chips and nicks can be removed. Concave cutting profiles can be corrected. Bolsters can be reduced where they have become proud of the cutting edge, and excessively thick blades can be thinned.

We can even completely re-serrate worn bread knives when requested or if we think it needs it.

These aren't separate cosmetic exercises. They are essential to making the knife function properly again. And processes we perform automatically and at no additional cost. To every knife. This is called our 360° care plan.

Refining the New Edge

Once the correct cutting geometry has been established, the edge is progressively refined.

Depending upon the knife and its finish, we use polishing systems extending upto 5,000 grit to smooth and refine the newly created edge before its final treatment on diamond steels.

Our objective isn't to remove lots of steel.

It's exactly the opposite.

What to expect

If your knife is relatively new and has never been sharpened before and shows no damage, then you can expect only a 2-3 mm bevel made to the blade in order to reach the expected average 15° angle ( depending on knife model ) . If your knife presents with damage or thickened tapers, bevels will be as large as they need to be in order to regain the correct blade geometry.

We ALWAYS remove the minimum amount necessary to repair the knife, restore its geometry and create an exceptionally sharp, functional cutting edge.

And Finally our Tomato Test…

We don't simply assume your knife is sharp.

Every knife is individually hand checked and must pass our filmed Tomato Test before it is cleared for return to you. Orders are photographed and recorded as part of our 360° Care Plan and quality-control process.

After all, sharpening isn't about whether a knife can shave arm hair or slice through a piece of paper for an impressive social-media video.

A kitchen knife has a much more important job.

It has to cut food.

That's why Blade & Butler doesn't simply sharpen your knife.

We assess it. Repair it. Correct it. Sharpen it. Refine it. And test it.

Because after more than a century at the sharpening wheel, we've learnt that the perfect edge isn't simply just about making a knife sharp.

It's about making that particular knife sharp in the right way.