So I took my first attempt at sharpening my OXO Pro knives today. I have a couple of Shun ones that will need to eventually be done but didn't want to mess those up so I thought practicing on the cheaper knives a bit early will help when it comes time to do touch ups later.
I have a set of diamond stones for my hand tools but after watching quite a few videos I decided to get a combination whetstone 1k/6k since it seems "feel" is a big part of sharpening kitchen knives. I went with the cheaper King KW-65 stone ($25 or so on amazon) and gave that a shot today. I probably should have gone with the KDS but didn't know the difference at the time. I have 6.5" and 4.5" Santokus that I've had for a bit and while they were sharp enough I figured I'd try and get them a bit sharper if I could.
It's a bit trickier than I thought it would be. I didn't find it hard to do the sharpening, the stone worked OK for the most part. The 1K side builds up slurry pretty quick and seem to build a burr pretty quickly, the 6K side seemed to build up a bit quickly though so I'll probably get a nagura stone or something. The 6K did put a decent polish on the edge though. The 1K side was pretty flat out of the box but the 6K side needed a bit more work to start with. I used my X-Coarse DMT plate to flatten both sided before I started. I do need to work a bit on my technique though and I'm still trying to figure out if I prefer Japanese vs Western style. I think I'm preferring the Western style as I find it a bit easier to maintain my angle even though it seems a bit slower.
Finding the right angle seemed to be my biggest difficulty. I guessed at the right height but turned out to be quite low at around 10-12 degrees I figure. I adjusted a bit and I think I'm closer to about 13-15 deg now but I think that's still a bit steeper than whatever was originally on there since the edge is a bit wider, and probably was sharper than I need to go with these blades. We'll see if they can maintain the edge after some use.
I went on Google to figure out some angles and I'm actually kind of surprised just how high you can angle the blade and still get a fairly low edge angle. I probably should have done that before hand and made a coin stack or something but I thought I could get away just by feel, I was wrong. I used a marker to make my adjustments to get the desired width after my initial failure.
I'm glad I practiced first though and I'm sure it'll take a bit longer before I feel like attempting it with my "nicer" knives. I did a comparison against my wife's knife and mine and it's definitely sharper. She's told me to stay away from her knives since the really sharp knives scare her for some reason.