I picked this chefs knife up today for $35. is it a good deal or naw?

im a dog eater you racist

What about buying cheaper knives and investing into sharpening stones, anyone had any experience with that here?

Cheaper knives won't hold an edge as long i.e. need to be sharpened more and will not last as long. Buy once cry once.

It's not quite that simple.

If you get a balsa wood strop and some diamond paste and use it to keep your kitchen knives touched up regularly (this works like a steeling rod, but better) then even fairly inexpensive kitchen knives can be kept quite sharp in home use for multiple months between full sharpenings.

Plus, decent quality cheap knives are good for learning how to freehand sharpen, ideally in combination with the fine side of a Norton India combination coarse/fine oilstone and some light mineral oil. This stone is inexpensive and fairly easy to use for a beginner, while the fine side is still coarse enough (~320 grit) to produce results in a timely fashion for a beginner.

With a ~$20 chef's knife, a ~$20 Norton India IB8 stone, some mineral oil, a balsa wood block, and some 6 micron DMT DiaPaste a novice can produce and maintain extremely sharp results relatively easily.

Sorry, bro. Neither a balsa wood strop nor a tube of dia-paste is going to make the cheap stainless steel your grocery store knife is made out of RETAIN its edge for any longer. That's what was saying. Edge retention depends on the properties of the steel, not your ability to sharpen it. Different alloys with different kinds of heat treatments will have differing levels of toughness and differing levels of hardness. Not all knives are equal in this regard.

A cheap knife can get sharpened so sharp that you can slice through tomatoes effortlessly - YES, we all concede that. However, after touching a wood cutting board while chopping different foods, it will lose its sharpness much faster than a good knife. I have a knife that I've been using to chop food on a cutting board every other night for two weeks since it was last sharpened - I have not touched it up at all in that - and it's still sharp enough to glide through tomato skin with no effort.

Last time I bought a knife I got one laser sharpened 8 times
It was so fucking sharp that I kept making small cuts in my hand, I just couldn't avoid it
However that initial sharp word down fast and even after sharpening it's nowhere near the same
I hear bad things about laser but I have been living alone for two years and cooking for just only two years and Even tho I love it I don't know a lot
Should I go to the hardware store to get it sharpened?

I'm well aware of that. What I am saying is that in home use a chef's knife isn't likely to get used enough in a single day that some post-use stropping won't be enough to restore the apex back to a sufficiently high level of sharpness.

So long as the edge retention is enough to make it through prepping a meal or two, then stropping on a pasted strop will be enough to maintain a high level of sharpness.

Of course, in a professional environment where a chef's knife is going to be used for hours and hours in a day, this approach will not work with a cheap knife, but for home use I believe the edge retention will be sufficient and the amount of time or skill required to do some regular light stropping is very low.

It is pretty much that simple
It's good to get your skills developed on cheaper knives because you can be fearless about grits, angles, and so on. Just keep in mind, some of the more expensive knives have very fussy, wear-resistant steels so it may be frustrating at first if you learned on easy cheap steel. Cheaper knives really do not give a fuck what kind of stones you have. Fancier ones, especially high end stainless, will punish you for cheaping out on the stones.

Who the hell wants to sharpen or strop every time you want to cook?

I also don't think it is sensible for someone to invest in expensive knives unless they have some experience with sharpening and are confident in their ability to maintain an expensive knife before they invest in one and in the higher grit stones necessary to get the most out of it.

In general, touching up a knife (whether it be by stropping, steeling, or on a high grit stone) will be faster and more effective the more frequently it is done because less microscopic damage will accumulate between touch-ups. Basically, the longer you wait between touch ups the harder they become to do and eventually your only choice will be to fully sharpen the knife, whereas when they are done frequently the apex can be kept in good condition for a very long time.

To give an example, I have a gyuto in Aogami Super that I last sharpened about 6 months ago and which I have kept touched up by stropping on balsa wood strop for 5-10 passes per side after each time I cooked. It will still push cut newsprint across the grain at 90 degrees after 6+ months of being touched up this way.

I would tend to agree with you. I have a $20 OXO knife I bought at Target a decade ago and I use it at least six times a week. I bought a steel and a sharpening stone off Amazon, watched a bunch of YT vids on how to sharpen, and this old blade is sharper now than when it was new. All it really takes now is a few swipes on the steel before use, and, maybe, a monthly quick turn on the stone, and it stays remarkably sharp.

A bit of advice that will help with that: Use the lightest possible touch you can manage on the steel. Barely touching is better than pressing hard.

This is because the contact area between a knife apex and a curved rod is very small, and pressure is equal to force times area so that very small contact area translates even a little bit of force into a lot of pressure.

Pressure on the apex is bad because it causes the apex to bend back and forth, which fatigues the metal and weakens it, and also because it tends to restore the apex by squishing the metal back into shape (technically called burnishing), which also fatigues the metal and weakens it. Using only a few grams of force when steeling will help to mitigate these issues.

>I also don't think it is sensible for someone to invest in expensive knives unless they have some experience with sharpening and are confident in their ability to maintain an expensive knife before they invest in one and in the higher grit stones necessary to get the most out of it.
That is totally inconsistent with the idea you expressed here: . Your alternative is to create a situation where someone MUST be "experienced in sharpening and confident in their ability to maintain it."

what's the best way to sharpen a shun classic at home? Like daily maintenance sharpening not the yearly kind

I don't really see the inconsistency between recommending an inexpensive knife for someone who is still a novice at sharpening, and saying that someone more practiced at sharpening can then decide if they want to invest more in a knife and stones.

The approach I propose in is intended for a novice sharpener. Stropping a chef's knife is extremely easy (in terms of required skills) as a way to keep a knife touched up between sharpenings, and the total cost outlay isn't that much.

Because that's not what you said. You said, "buy a cheap knife and sharpen it constantly, literally every day." Then you said, "there's no point to buy a nice knife" = don't buy a nice knife. If you can't see the cognitive dissonance, then there's no helping you.

For touch-ups there are a few different apparoaches you can take:

1) Using the highest grit stone that was used in the initial sharpening to touch up the edge (e.g. if a knife was finished on a JIS 5,000 grit waterstone, using just that stone to refresh the edge)

2) Using a steel to re-align the edge. This should only be used on softer western style knives and really should ideally be avoided because the plastic deformation this causes in the apex reduces future edge retention.

3) Using a stop made out of balsa wood with some diamond paste or spray on it (6 micron DMT DiaPaste is an easy to find option). This actually sharpens the apex at a microscopic scale, rather than burnishing it like a steeling rod, and is a fairly easy way to keep a kitchen knife touched up for some time. This is not a commonly used option today with kitchen knives, but I think it should be because it replicates the desired results of steeling with much less of a negative effect on edge retention.

thanks for the advice. I'll look into 1 and 3

I never intended to imply that I thought there was no point to buying a nice knife. I only meant that in home use a cheap knife touched up frequently can perform quite reasonably well, and that I think its a good option for someone who is learning how to sharpen.

I don't really see five or ten swipes per side on a strop as a particularly onerous burden, and I wouldn't tend to categorize it as "sharpening" in the sense it is usually meant (i.e. fully re-sharpening the knife).

Looks nice. How she chop? I like my Lansom sharp myself. Bit more pricy than that blade though. Doesn't make it better

Where'd you get it from??